A few months ago, Guy Kawasaki blogged on  How to Kick Silicon Valley's Butt.  I thought Guy had some interesting points (aside from the gratuitous insult to Cleveland, which, if you discount the snow, is a wonderful and friendly area to live).  However, the question is, what does Guy know about starting a company anywhere but in Silicon Valley?  I have some specific issues with his advice, which I'll take up on over a couple of posts. 

One of Guys' first points is:  Focus on educating engineers. The most important thing you can do is establish a world-class school of engineering. Engineering schools beget engineers. Engineers beget ideas. And ideas beget companies. End of discussion.  

Baloney - all the engineers in the world can't start a company (and compete with funded companies in Silicon Valley and around the world) without sufficient (smart) capital.  Utah has educated plenty of smart engineers who've gone on to grow and create really great companies - somewhere else.  These include (among others) John Warnock (Adobe), Ed Catmull (LucasFilm and Pixar),  Nolan Bushnell (Atari), and Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape, Healtheon and MyCFO.com).  They DIDN'T start them in Utah.  There may be many reasons, but Capital is a crucial one.

In addition, engineers need business partners and management talent.  If a company is going to be a major player on the world market (or even a really strong regional player), it has to be run to "win" and that requires management talent and some experience. 

That said, without great inventors, great engineers and great ideas, you also don't get great companies, so educating engineers is one crucial element, but Utah's had great engineers for a long time, and is only now coming into its own in growing great companies.