In 2008, Princeton economist and New York Times writer Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. Ostensibly for his work on trade theory, the award nonetheless mentions how his ideas piqued interest in the economics of agglomeration. The notion is that firms can achieve operational efficiencies by co-locating in particular geographic areas. It builds upon the work of Alfred Marshall and Alfred Weber, who argued that regional clusters of firms can maximize the benefits of unique local resources, provide economies of scale across various facets of the operation, and access specialized labour markets and industry-specific infrastructures. For Krugman, the geographical concentration of firms, even in high-wage economies where labour inputs are expensive, can endow advantages that otherwise might not be possible precisely because specialist activities concentrate talent and key resources.

These ideas, alongside those of theorists on industrial districts and the architecture of emerging markets, complement the burgeoning literature on entrepreneurship and enable us better to conceptualize how new firms grow and stabilize, and how their interaction with competitors and suppliers is shaped by institutional parameters. Such a framework is particularly useful in analysing the emergence of the North Carolina wine marketplace. Having struggled for centuries to establish itself as an area of grape growing and winemaking, North Carolina's success of the last decade has been centred on clusters of firms and a cooperative framework of information sharing.