Route 128: Lessons from Boston's High-Tech Community

The Needham Puzzle Reconsidered: Organizations, Organizing, and Innovation in China

“…Before Silicon Valley, there was a hub of innovative activity around New York's IBM, as well as the Boston area (Rosegrant & Lampe, 1993). The changes that led to the shift towards Silicon Valley as hub for innovation included changes in the markets, technologies, governance, and educational structures conducive to the particular industries.…”

Developing Knowledge Cities

“…Similar concentrations have been found in the United States. Audretsch and Feldman (1996), using innovation citations from over a hundred scientific and trade journals, showed that California (41.7 %) and Massachusetts (12 %) accounted for over half of the innovations in the computer industry by 1982, a result of the well-known concentration of these activities in Silicon Valley (O'Mara 2005) and Route 128 around Boston (Rosegart and Lampe 1992;Mackun 2013). This pattern of concentration of the research side of the industry in a few locations, which are usually called research clusters, has been duplicated in many other counties (Cooke 2001;Cooke and Swartz 2007).…”

Regional networks of hightechnology firms — the case of the greater Boston region

“…The region has a long history of industrial development and has seen a series of structural transformations from the early textile industry in the past century to the modern high-tech industries such as the computer and electronic industry along "Route 128" or the new biotechnology industry in Cambridge and Boston (Harrison and Kluver 1989). At the end of the 1980s there were about 3000 hightech companies in Massachusetts, accounting for about 10% of the state's employment (Rosegrant and Lampe 1992). The region, furthermore, provides a rich institutional environment for high-tech firms as regards universities and educational institutions, research laboratories as well as venture capital and producer services.…”