Global Entrepreneurs: Leaders in Creating IE Enterprises

Intellectual capital is the fastest -growing source of wealth in the digitally linked innovative technology economy. Silicon Valley is the nexus for the capitalization of knowledge. The emergence of high-tech global businesses emanating and linked through Silicon Valley to other regions is an important success factor making it the "magnetic force."

A new global entrepreneurial class of industry executives drives this multi-regional digital knowledge economy. Davidi Gilo, founder of DSPC who sold his business to Intel for $1.6 billion in 1999, is such an example.

Davidi Gilo, born and raised in Israel, served in the Israel Defense Forces, and like many of his compatriots came of age through his experience with innovative technology in the army. In 1986 Gilo took $500,000 of his own seed capital and built DSPC based on products using digital signal processing, a technology originated by the Israeli military that is a key component in products such as answering machines, global positioning systems, and laptop computers.

Headquartered in Cupertino, California, DSPC based its organizational model on engineering in Israel, manufacturing in Japan, and focused the management and marketing base in Silicon Valley. Gilo originally sought to buy a company in Israel; he found that Israeli businesses had very good basic technology capabilities, but unfortunately , very poor marketing and business understanding. So his strategy became to start a company in which the R&D was in Israel, but the headquarters were in Silicon Valley. This approach has been successfully applied by many multinational global businesses.