Fairly regularly, groups from outside the US plan visits to Silicon Valley. This usually involves visiting the usual large corporate suspects; sometimes there's also some time with one of the startup incubators like Rocket Space or 500 Startups.

Another way to get insight into how the Valley operates is to attend Meetups. This requires some planning, and advanced registration - popular meetups like the iOS developers forum can have 400 people sign up within hours of announcing the next meeting. The Bay Area Hadoop Users Group has somewhat similar dynamics. There are so many meetups in the Valley, though, that there's almost bound to be something relevant on in a reasonable location most weeks. The UI to meetup.com allows search by distance from a place as well as topic.
For meetups with technical topics, the motivation of meetup sponsors - the companies in whose premises the meetings take place - are usually, and sometimes explicitly, to find potential employees. The typical agenda will include a speaker from the hosting company, a speaker with expertise in a 'hot' topic, perhaps a live demonstration, and a session for Q & A, both in public and one to one. There's usually at least half an hour before and after the main agenda for 'networking', which is a fine way to make new acquaintances, most of whom will be living and working in the Valley, as well as to get an impression about the buildings and locations in which business is done.

The usual timing for these things is early evening, and so some kind of food is usually offered - this may be beer and pizza, or food trucks, or something more elaborate depending on the sponsor's budget. There's no charge made to attend. Registration for Meetup requires an email address, and putting up with their hail of suggestions about new groups and meetups.

For example, Bank of New York Mellon has recently launched an incubator as a way to learn from the Valley about startups and implementations relevant to its ambitions to overhaul its IT - it is the oldest US bank, so has a long legacy of systems. It hosted the Palo Alto Data Science meetup, topic 'Big Data Challenges in Financial Institutions' at Pivotal Labs premises on Deer Creek in Palo Alto, where the new incubator is located. Their ongoing program is the Silicon Valley Financial Services meetup.

http://www.meetup.com/sviphone/
http://www.meetup.com/Palo-Alto-Data-Science-Association/events/209747082/
http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-Financial-Services-Cloud/