Regional Advantage

In the 1990s, California’s Silicon Valley and Massachusetts’ Route 128 had similar histories and comparable technologies. Despite this similarity, Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations. The result was that despite sharing histories and technologies, Silicon Valley had more success than Route 128 in the 1990s. Annalee Saxenian’s analysis suggests that decentralized and cooperative systems are much more likely to succeed than ones in which independent and self-sufficient corporations dominate.