Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
network to something largely characteristic of the pure agglom-
eration model, with highly competitive and flexible local market
arrangements, which have emerged in quite different ways. For
example, the Silicon Valley elements of this industry which have
tended to focus on semiconductor design activities. Although the
early post-war features of such activities in Silicon Valley were
mainly typical of the trust-led social network model (Saxenian
1994; Hall, 1998), this industry developed during the 1970s along
the lines of a competence-based social network, and has now
emerged into something which is akin to a pure agglomeration
(Arita and McCann, 2000, 2004; Saxenian 1994), exhibiting the
supplier dominated characteristics of Pavitt's classification. The
majority of the design innovations developed in Silicon Valley are
made possible essentially because of the miniaturization inno-
vations generated in the wafer processing and wafer assembly
parts of the industry which are primarily located elsewhere, as
components of global value chains with large MNEs flagships. As
such, the evolutionary transition of the Silicon Valley cluster has
been from trust-led to competence-based social network, and
more recently to pure agglomeration.
(10) In terms of the evolution from a competence-based network
to an industrial complex, one possible example of this transition
is that of the Airbus industry based around Toulouse in France
(Longhi 2005). This might also represent the evolutionary path
of the life-science industry in the Sophia-Antipolis industrial
cluster (ter Wal 2010). Sophia-Antipolis is one of the archetypes
of successful European high-tech clusters and, for our purposes
here, offers a very interesting case of how different evolutionary
trajectories can coexist even within the same spatial structure.
As shown by ter Wal (2010), over time the cluster has progres-
sively specialized in information technology (IT) and, to a much
lesser extent, in life-science. The development of the IT industry
- after the crisis of electronics in the early 1990s - has been
characterized by a shift from foreign MNE-led growth to mainly
locally-based growth driven by technological-intensive spin-off
and start-up SMEs established by the highly qualified labour left
in the region by the relocating MNEs (Quéré 2007, cited in ter
Wal 2010). Conversely, the life-science industry has remained
through time dependent of foreign MNE subsidiaries, scarcely
embedded into the region and in its dense localized knowledge
