Speaker(s): Lee Fleming (HBS)
Title:
Author(s): Lee Fleming, Lyra Colfer, Alexandra Marin, Jonathan McPhie
Abstract
Are the inventor networks of Silicon Valley more densely connected than
those of the Boston Route 128 corridor? The evidence remains mostly
historical and controversial to date. We develop an analysis of all the
patented inventors in both regions since 1975 and find that the networks of
Silicon Valley are simultaneously more connected and less robust than those of
Boston. Of greatest interest, Silicon Valley demonstrates a dramatic
agglomeration of its inventors, such that half of them can trace an indirect
path to one another through co-authors by 1999. Boston, despite a very
similar number of patents, inventors, technologies, firms, and overall density
of ties, agglomerates later and even today lags Silicon Valley. This
process of emergence of a "giant component" occurs through the linking
of a region's larger components. Based upon interviews with inventors who
did and did not create linking ties across a region's components, we identify a
variety of similarities and differences in the agglomeration and
non-agglomeration processes of co-authoring networks across the two regions.
While our limited sample found more reports of information flow across firms in
the Valley, inventors reported very similar experiences and attitudes in the two
regions. Ultimately, we find an institutional explanation for a large
portion of the Valley's advantage: a single post-doctoral fellowship program at
IBM's Almaden Valley Labs was responsible for up to 30% of the region's initial
agglomeration process.