The geography of innovation describes the importance of proximity and location to innovative activity. As part of what has been termed the new economic geography, this area of research is less than 20 years old, and is now developed sufficiently so that the discussion can be organized around certain stylized and commonly accepted facts: • Innovation is spatially concentrated. • Geography provides a platform to organize economic activity. • All places are not equal: urbanization, localization, and diversity. • Knowledge spillovers are geographically localized. • Knowledge spillovers are nuanced, subtle, pervasive, and not easily amenable to measurement. • Local universities are necessary but not sufficient for innovation. • Innovation benefits from local buzz and global pipelines. • Places are defined over time by an evolutionary process. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize recent work on innovation and location in light of these themes, and to consider how these stylized facts shed light on the broader process of technological change and economic growth. While firms are one venue to organize economic activity, the resources required to generate innovation are typically not confined to a single firm, and geography provides another means to organize the factors of production. Geography is additionally a venue for complex multifaceted social relationships, and human community and creativity that are beyond the economic sphere. Economies are complex: highly integrated, globally interconnected, and highly agglomerated on centers of activity. There is always the temptation to analyze economic institutions and actors individually; however, the new economic geography literature considers the large context. Of course, once the analysis is open to consider geography there is a need to understand history, building a deep contextualized understanding of a place and the relationships that define it. The present review of the literature summarizes the advancements made in this stream of inquiry, but also indicates that many open avenues for research remain, thus encouraging others to contribute to the emerging field of economic geography.

Stylized Facts in the Geography of Innovation

De-globalization, now a distinct possibility, would induce a significant qualitative shift in strategies, structures, and behaviors observable in international business (IB). Coming to terms with this qualitative shift would require IB research to develop a much deeper integration of politics, the key driver of de-globalization. To support such integration, this paper introduces two relevant theories of (de-)globalization from political science, liberalism and realism. Both predict de-globalization under current conditions but lead to different expectations about the future world economy: liberalism suggests a patchwork of economic linkages, while realism predicts the emergence of economic blocs around major countries. This paper discusses the resulting opportunities in three areas of IB research: political strategies and roles of multinational enterprises (MNEs), global value chains, and the role of the national context. For political strategies and roles, there is a need to explore how regular business activities and deliberate political agency of MNEs affect the political sustainability of globalization. For value chains, questions include their future reach and specialization, changes in organizational forms, and the impact of political considerations on location decisions. Research opportunities on national contexts relate to their ability to sustain globalization and their connection with economic and military power.

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De-globalization: Theories, predictions, and opportunities for international business research

Why do investments in certain places yield jobs, growth, and prosperity while similar investments made in seemingly identical places fail to produce the desired results? Starting with the observation that innovation clusters spatially across a broad spectrum of industries, my work seeks to understand the mechanisms and institutions that promote the creation of useful knowledge. In my conceptualization, entrepreneurs, as the agents who recognize opportunity, mobilize resources, and create value, are key to the creation of institutions and the building of capacity that will sustain regional eco- nomic development. Entrepreneurs benefit from loca- tion. But entrepreneurs are also pivotal as agents of change that can transform local communities. The initial event or entrepreneurial spark that gives rise to prosperous regions is not deterministic nor do they automatically set in motion path dependencies that automatically yield successful places. What matters most is human agency—the building of institutions and the myriad public and private decisions that determine what I call the character of place—a spirit of authenticity, engagement, and common purpose.

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The character of innovative places: entrepreneurial strategy, economic development, and prosperity

edu The abrupt reversal of culturally ascribed primacy in the science‐technology relationship—namely, from the primacy of science relative to technology prior to circa 1980, to the primacy of technology relative to science since about that date—is proposed as a demarcator of postmodernity from modernity: modernity is when ‘science’ could, and often did, denote technology too; postmodernity is when science is subsumed under technology. In support of that demarcation criterion, I evidence the breadth and strength of modernity’s presupposition of the primacy of science to and for technology by showing its preposterous hold upon social theorists—Marx, Veblen, Dewey—whose principles logically required the reverse, viz. the primacy of practice; upon 19th and 20th century engineers and industrialists, social actors whose practical interests likewise required the reverse; and upon the principal theorizers in the 1970s of the role of science in late 20th century technology and society. The reversal in primacy between science and technology ca 1980 came too unexpectedly, too quickly, and, above all, too unreflectively to have resulted from the weight of evidence or the force of logic. Rather, it was a concomitant of the onset of postmodernity. Oddly, historians of technology have remained almost wholly unacknowledging of postmodernity’s epochal elevation of the cultural standing of the subject of their studies, and, specifically, have ignored technology’s elevation relative to science. This I attribute to the ideological character of that discipline, and, specifically, to its strategy of ignoration of science.

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The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology

This article analyzes the evolution of the entrepreneurial university from a narrow focus on capturing the commercializable results of the ‘meandering stream of basic research’ to a broader interes...

Anatomy of the entrepreneurial university

I n Making Silicon Valley, Christophe Lecuyer shows that the explosive growth of the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley was the culmination of decades of growth and innovation in the San Francisco-area electronics industry. Using the tools of science and technology studies, he explores the formation of Silicon Valley as an industrial district, from its beginnings as the home of a few radio enterprises that operated in the shadow of RCA and other East Coast firms through its establishment as a center of the electronics industry and a leading producer of power grid tubes, microwave tubes, and semiconductors. He traces the emergence of the innovative practices that made this growth possible by following key groups of engineers and entrepreneurs. He examines the forces outside Silicon Valley that shaped the industry -- in particular the effect of military patronage and procurement on the growth of the industry and on the development of technologies -- and considers the influence of Stanford University and other local institutions of higher learning. Lecuyer argues that Silicon Valley's emergence and its growth were made possible by the development of unique competencies in manufacturing, in product engineering, and in management. Entrepreneurs learned to integrate invention, design, manufacturing, and sales logistics, and they developed incentives to attract and retain a skilled and motivated workforce. The largest Silicon Valley firms -- including Eitel-McCullough (Eimac), Litton Industries, Varian Associates, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel -- dominated the American markets for advanced tubes and semiconductors and, because of their innovations in manufacturing, design, and management, served as models and incubators for other electronics ventures in the area.

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Making Silicon Valley : innovation and the growth of high tech, 1930-1970

It is widely argued that, in the United States, the Department of Defense dictated the intellectual contours of academic science and engineering during the Cold War. However, in important ways, American science was also deeply influenced by industry. Between 1955 and 1985, Stanford University embraced three waves of industrial innovation in solid state technology (transistors, integrated circuits, and VLSI systems). As this essay shows, it was these transfers that enabled Stanford engineers to make significant contributions to the expanding fields of microelectronics and computing.

What do Universities Really owe Industry? The Case of Solid State Electronics at Stanford

This study advocates for ‘materials‐centered’ accounts in the history of technology, and presents such an analysis for the early history of microelectronics. Innovations in semiconductor crystal production were central to the emergence of solid state electronics and the dynamics of the early semiconductor industry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Bell Telephone Laboratories developed novel techniques for growing semiconductor single crystals. These crystal‐making techniques were scaled up at Texas Instruments for the production of silicon transistors, and thereby underwrote the firm’s rise as a dominant manufacturer of silicon devices. Shockley Semiconductor, a West Coast start‐up, sought to gain a competitive advantage in the silicon device business by developing a new technique for producing silicon crystals. The failure of this strategy contributed to the disintegration of the firm, with several key staff members leaving to establish Fairchild Semiconductor. Learning from Shockley’s failure, Fai...

The Materiality of Microelectronics

This article examines the emergence of ion implantation as a major semiconductor manufacturing process from the early 1960s through the late 1970s. Ion implantation techniques originated in nuclear physics research and were first employed to make solar cells for military satellites at the Ion Physics Corporation (IPC). This work at IPC inspired a research group at Sprague Electric to use ion implantation techniques to make transistors. Sprague's process development work, and its key finding that ion implantation enabled the control of critical transistor characteristics, were both exploited by Mostek, a semiconductor start‐up funded by Sprague. Mostek's engineers incorporated ion implantation into their manufacturing process to produce a string of integrated circuits that other firms could not make. Mostek's market success encouraged semiconductor firms to embrace ion implantation in the early and mid 1970s. By the end of the decade, ion implantation was used in the manufacture of virtually all advanced i...

Christophe Lécuyer

Papers

Making Silicon Valley : innovation and the growth of high tech, 1930-1970

What do Universities Really owe Industry? The Case of Solid State Electronics at Stanford

The Materiality of Microelectronics

From nuclear physics to semiconductor manufacturing: the making of ion implantation

The Making of a Science Based Technological University: karl compton, james killian, and the Reform of MIT, 1930-1957