David Larsson Heidenblad, Associate Professor of History and Deputy Director of LUCK, has received funding from the Swedish Research Council for his project “’California Dreamin’: Silicon Valley Knowledge, Culture, and Capital in Late 20th Century Sweden”. The project will study how the model of Silicon Valley came to influence Swedish society through decisive innovations such as a small cap stock exchange, private venture capital firms, and an influx of entrepreneurial management literature.

Social scientists and historians have sought to explain Silicon Valley’s outsized global impact, and it is well known that Sweden was at the forefront of both digitalisation and marketisation in the 1980s and 1990s. However, despite excellent national histories of computing and a flurry of new research on the Swedish ‘market turn’, we have but limited understanding of Silicon Valley’s direct and indirect influence on these developments.

The project will focus on the period from the late 1970s to the bursting of the IT-bubble in 2000, a period when Silicon Valley – in contrast to today’s widespread fears and skepticism towards big tech-companies, billionaire entrepreneurs, and AI – predominantly served as a beacon of a better future.

Photo by Gustavo Zambelli on Unsplash