Why does it have to be in an existing city? Why not move the jobs to where the land is cheap? The only jobs that require a specific location are those that require the mass movement of goods. The silicon valley here in CA is a prime example. All of those jobs could be moved to bumphuck Idaho tomorrow morning.
There is no educated base in bumphuck Idaho to populate those jobs. And you aren't just going to move the highly educated out to cornfields and hog lagoons when there is no available services that the educated like: higher scale shops, food sources and restaurants, little hipster boutiques. Museums, outdoors activities that aren't limited to "walking in some flat place."
So, no, you can't just make culture happen overnight. ...It's an absurd proposition that you are making to counter generations of how we understand cities are created.
And these places aren't just created--they are born from the local area that already has the necessary resources, largely untapped. Basically, established highly-educated and entrepreneurial individuals. Palo Alto was, essentially, a "poor sleepy, middle class" town as recently as the late 70s. But it would be wrong to assume that Silicon Valley just happened there overnight--the people that started their and moved out there to start things, understood that the workforce was already there. Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF, Davis...all of it was already there. Good luck finding it anywhere else.
...this is also pretty much why RTP happened in ~central eastern NC (now the highest concentration of PhDs in the country). The potential workforce was already there, had long been established. So it's not like SAS and Glaxo and IBM just decided that they could "make it happen!" from nothing. They've tried to do the same thing along 70 in eastern NC...been trying for more than 20 years now. but hey, it's been abandoned. Why? because there is no work force. There are, however, a bunch of pigs and their lakes of pig shit. ...because that's what they do in Eastern NC. Good luck convincing the highly educated to move out to pig shit land to code and build their yuppy 3-flats. But, I guess you think this can "just happen" in Iowa...which is already pretty much dedicated to using up all of that "free land" to actually grow food and stuff.