Applications of Evolutionary Economic Geography



Research has paid special attention to the geography of high-tech entrepreneurship (Hall and
Markusen, 1985; De Jong, 1987; Aydalot and Keeble, 1988; Saxenian, 1994; Stuart and
Sorenson, 2003). New high-tech firms are commonly thought to fuel employment growth and
regional economic development. In the present volume, we focus on two exceptional European
regions that have been successful in fostering high-tech entrepreneurship in Information and
Communication Technology (ICT). The two cases concern Cambridge, UK and Sophia-Antipolis
near Nice. The development of Cambridge as a high-tech region can be understood as resulting
from an endogenous evolutionary process of entrepreneurs setting up business and hereby
improving the conditions for new ventures to occur (Garnsey and Heffernan, forthcoming). The
endogenous process encompassed the founding of companies by members of the university, spin-
offs, the rise of local suppliers and the emergence of specialist labour markets. This process,
however, has not been entirely ‘automatic’. Once congestion became problematic and university
regulations were perceived unfavourable for entrepreneurship, collective action resulted in
institutional reform. Thus, the history of the Cambridge region illustrates both the endogenous
nature of entrepreneurship and the co-evolutionary process of entrepreneurship, regional
development and institutional change. Another example of successful regional development is the
science park of Sophia-Antipolis. However, its development was far from endogenous. Rather the
process was triggered by the presence of a few large companies, a favourable living environment
and a visionary man (Quéré, forthcoming). Interestingly, the process transformed from being
triggered by external factors into a more endogenous process from the early 1990s onwards. The
endogenous nature of the more recent history is evidenced by the fact that even though some
larger firms left the park in the early 1990s to go to larger agglomerations such as Paris and
London, employees decided not to leave the region, but to start their own ventures instead. In this
particular case, it is the employee rather than the firm that shows locational inertia. Thus, the two
cases of Cambridge and Sophia-Antipolis are different yet equally successful in the creation of
new high-tech firms (see also, Garnsey and Longhi, 2004).

2.2. Industrial dynamics

Starting from the firm, the first meso-level of aggregation that is specifically important in
evolutionary economic geography is the industry-level. In this context, the main phenomenon to
be explained is the process of spatial concentration or de-concentration of an industry over time.



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