ABSTRACT
In the fifteen years since an earlier vintage of this chapter was published, much has changed that affects both our understanding of how the high tech sectors of regions prosper, or not, and the strategies that cities and regions in fact design and implement to attract, grow, and retain high tech economic activity. Much of this change lies in the dramatically different economic environments regions face then and now. The process of increasing globalization was taking place then, but its reach had not advanced nearly as far as now. The term ‘knowledge economy’ would have been an unusual one to see in print, and we were only beginning to imagine some of the impacts of the IT revolution on how business would be conducted. In the world of practice, ‘high tech’, or technology-based economic development, was still seen as a niche area affecting only a relatively small number of sectors in most regions, and thinking about planning for clusters of related industries rather than individual sectors had not yet been adopted.
