Dec 5, 2014

AnnaLee Saxenian Marks the 20th Anniversary of Her Landmark Book on Silicon Valley

From Harvard Business Review

What Still Makes Silicon Valley So Special

By Justin Fox

Every once in a while, AnnaLee Saxenian, the dean of the School of Information and a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, will find herself in a meeting where someone decides to explain to her why Silicon Valley has been so spectacularly successful. Her interlocutor will tell her a story of ever-evolving networks, of workers who leap from startup to startup, of companies that fail and then recombine with other failures into big successes. Says Saxenian, laughing a little, “I’ll just sit there and say, ‘Oh really? Yeah, I think I have heard about that.’”

She hasn’t just heard about it. She was the first to really tell the story, in one of the most important and influential business books of the past quarter century. In Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Saxenian set out to describe what differentiated California’s Silicon Valley from the tech industry outside Boston, which started out stronger than its West Coast rival but withered in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, she gave Silicon Valley much of the framework and vocabulary by which the region now makes sense of itself....

Read more...

Last updated:

October 4, 2016