ABSTRACT
The IT industry began as a spatially concentrated economic activity, as the early research on the sector and some histories of the activity have shown. That concentration, explained primarily via some very substantial physical and intellectual agglomeration economies, was expressed via the initial wave of activity in the manufacture of IT hardware. Key components of agglomeration emergence (e.g. at Santa Clara or ‘Silicon Valley’) crossed functional boundaries. They included the initial advantage of advanced, ‘ahead of the curve’ technological knowledge possessed by the ‘traitorous eight’ that left William Shockley, their Nobel Laureate doctoral supervisor at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. The most successful entrepreneurs of the eight were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, subsequently founders of Intel, and Eugene Kleiner, co-founder of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital firm. Thus, arcane knowledge and risk capital were instantly combined, augmented by public (defence) research contracts and high-grade talent-formation institutions, notably UC Berkeley and Stanford universities nearby.
