Clusters: Silicon Valley and other locations

Clusters

Contrary to claims that location and distance no longer matter, geography is of critical importance for the infrastructure that underpins development and for the social networks that bring together -

capital, including business angels, venture capital managers and banks
facilitators such as lawyers and accountants
facilities such as incubators
academic researchers
entrepreneurs
technical support staff

We thus see supposedly 'spaceless' new economy industries clustering in specific geographical locations, in particular New York, California and Bangalore. An ongoing challenge for government - and source of wealth for consultants - has been to identify what makes those locations attractive, how their attractiveness can be maintained or how they can be cloned

points of entry

Key works are Annalee Saxenian's classic Regional Advantage: Culture & Competition In Silicon Valley & Route 128 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1996), The Dynamic Firm: The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization and Regions (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1998) edited by Alfred Chandler, Peter Hagstrom & Orjan Solvell, Matthew Zook's 1998 paper on The Web of Consumption: The Spatial Organization of the Internet Industry in the US andJohn Brown & Paul Duguid's Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dynamics In Silicon Valley paper.

Perspectives are provided in Chris Benner's Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) by Christophe Lécuyer and Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2003) by Glenna Matthews. As noted elsewhere, John Markoff's What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking 2005) offers a revisionist - and for us unconvincing - account of the birth of the PC.

other snapshots