Extract

There has been a great bias in economic geography and industry studies toward studying pioneering high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley. As a result, smaller regions that have managed to establish entrepreneurial and innovative high-tech clusters have often been overlooked. Yet, these so-called ‘second-tier’ high-tech regions have also been successful in growing and fostering concentrations of specialized high-tech firms (Mayer, 2009, 2011). Moreover, these regions might be able to shed light on one of the most important questions in economic geography and industry studies: how do clusters of knowledge-based industries emerge? Second-tier high-tech regions might be ideal cases to examine this question. Unlike Silicon Valley, they do not have certain prerequisites of high-tech growth such as a world-class research university and large amounts of venture capital. Instead, these high-tech regions have bootstrapped their economies through extensive spinoff processes. In this chapter, I argue that it is exactly these spinoff processes that can help us understand the emergence of second-tier high-tech regions and more specifically clusters in general. A focus on spinoff regions will help us address a lack of understanding about cluster formation and the processes by which spatial concentrations of knowledge-based industries come into existence. In recent years, scholars have started to examine the genesis of clusters and they are paying particular attention to the role of entrepreneurship (Braunerhjelm and Feldmann, 2006). Economic geographers and industry studies scholars are starting to develop concepts and theories about the genesis and formation of clusters.