If any of you want to know more about Intel's early days, I strongly suggest reading Tedlow's biography of Andy Grove. He goes into great detail about the early culture of Silicon Valley, more than any of the articles I've seen posted online.
It was excellent on-the-job training, but there probably is a more efficient way of training entrepreneurs than by letting them make all the mistakes.
If the strongest Moore can say is that there's "probably" a more efficient way, with all his experience, it makes me doubt there is one. I think it is possible to train people for spin-off companies, because they are in the same kind of business; but for founding a new type of industry, I don't think it's possible to train entrepreneurs, because there's no one who knows how to do it to train them. The only way to learn the unknown is by making "mistakes", a.k.a experiments.
This has minimized spin-offs, because we design our development specifically to transfer into the factory; so we don't have the problem of developing technology and ideas that we have no place for. Technology transfer is always difficult. We have tried to minimize the need to transfer it.
Xerox PARC didn't solve that one.
The Intel guys fully experienced terribly frustrating problems, and then came up with ways of solving them. I think both aspects contribute to their incredible success.
I recently read "Crystal Fire", http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Birth-Information-Technol..., an account of the invention an commercialization of the transistor. Prominent in the book are Shockley and how the companies that spun off from his original start up founded the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.
If any of you want to know more about Intel's early days, I strongly suggest reading Tedlow's biography of Andy Grove. He goes into great detail about the early culture of Silicon Valley, more than any of the articles I've seen posted online.