ABSTRACT
Over the last decade the connections between innovation and regional growth have become a central avenue of research for academics and policy-makers alike. With the shift to a new phase of capitalism (variously labeled the information economy, postindustrialism, the Fifth Kondratiev, post-Fordism, or the New Economy) the most important type of competitiveness is argued to be sustained only through learning and innovation, to anticipate and outrun attempts at imitation by competitors. Geographers have argued that these key processes are territorially embedded, and examined how regional industrial “clusters” foster and support conditions conducive to knowledge creation, inventiveness, and learning. No region has been more intensely scrutinized than Silicon Valley, California. Widely regarded as the paradigmatic icon of economic and technological success in the global knowledge economy, this region is consistently held up as a visible example of what other regions can do to distinguish themselves in a world of heightened spatial competition and of eroding regional policy (Markusen 1999). Consequently, governments across the world have become fixated with trying to recreate the conditions that engendered the region’s vitality and innovation, in order to grow their own high-tech “clusters.”
