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.