ABSTRACT

Since the early 1980s, State, local and regional economic development strategies

have faced an accelerating pace of technological change, new patterns of work and

production organization. The globalization of technology and markets is

transforming economic development as we know it. These strategies represented

a considerable advance over traditional approaches to economic development,

which were premised upon the core principles of the old mass-production economy

and thus focused on the recruitment of industrial branch plants through the use of

incentives such as tax breaks, industrial revenue bonds and so forth (Harrison &

Kanter 1978, Blair & Premus 1987). The movement away from “smokestack chasing”

involved a cluster of strategies designed to spur the development of locally based

high technology, entrepreneurship and venture capital in an attempt to emulate

California’s Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128 (Piore & Sabel 1984, Saxenian

1984, Birch 1987, Eisenger 1988, Osborne 1988, Rosenfeld 1992). A related set of

strategies emphasized manufacturing through the development of policies and

programs to encourage companies to adopt advanced manufacturing technology

(Cohen & Zysman 1988, Shapira 1990, Rosenfeld 1992). In large part, these second

wave strategies focused on providing technical assistance to firms in specific areas

related to changing patterns of economic competition. Put simply, these approaches

emphasized the use of specific government business services and in effect saw the

role of government as providing direct “retail” economic development services to

business.