ABSTRACT
Research on industrial districts has a long history, which traces back at least to the economist Alfred Marshall (1920). Policy-makers and scholars have recently rediscovered the concept of industrial district, partly because of Silicon Valley’s enormous success. As late as the 1930s, the Santa Clara Valley (today known as Silicon Valley) in the San Francisco Bay Area was still a piece of farmland filled with fruit orchards. In merely a few decades, it transformed into the number one high-tech center in the world. That has made policy-makers throughout the world consider cloning a Silicon Valley to boost their own local economies (Rosenberg, 2002). It has also revived researchers’ interests in economic geography that examines the formation and performance of industrial clusters (Krugman, 1991). A particularly intriguing fact about Silicon Valley is how it surpassed early starters such as Route 128, the high-tech cluster in the Boston area.
