Introduction

Many communities around the world want the economic benefits associated with high-technology jobs and companies. But creating and nurturing centers of high-technology, what we call “enterprising places,” is a complex business. Even when a place has the essential resources: an excellent university or research center, land and facilities for companies, and an educated workforce, it is not clear how to sustain a center from them. The efforts of policymakers to do just that comprise a rich source of experimental evidence. In 2002 and 2003, a research team from MIT and the University of Cambridge set out to examine this evidence in five regions known to be centers of high-technology in the United States and United Kingdom.

To guide the research, we focused on four realms that figured prominently in enterprising places: knowledge, finance, policy, and place (figure 12.1). We were especially interested in actions at the intersections of these realms and how they enhanced a location's competitiveness. We defined the “knowledge realm” to include the people, skills and ideas, and related education and research institutions that were located in a particular place. The finance realm represented the capital, institutions, and people that sustain investment in a place over time. The “policy realm” represented the institutional and regulatory context and the public and private policy agents that influenced the development of a place. The “place realm” represented the competencies of the location in terms of proximity, access, and concentration.