From Inc.
How Should Cities Attract Businesses?
By Greg Satell
When Amazon announced it would pull out of its HQ2 project in Long Island City due to local opposition, many were shocked. How could local residents oppose a deal that would generate 25,000 jobs and $27 billion in tax revenues for a relatively meager $3 billion in tax breaks? It just seemed illogical and bizarre...
Regional Advantage
In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, the key difference was that while Route 128 saw itself as a collection of individual companies, Silicon Valley saw itself as an ecosystem...
While in my own personal conversations with Saxenian she was careful to stress that many of the differences were due to a unique confluence of forces at the time, there's much we can learn from Silicon Valley's rise and Route 128's concurrent decline. The best way to support businesses is by empowering them to succeed...
AnnaLee (Anno) Saxenian is Dean of the School of Information and she holds a joint faculty appointment in the School of Information and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.
