Paths and Regions- The Creation and Growth of Silicon Valley

For the last 40 years, a geographic and mental space in the San Francisco Bay Area now known as Silicon Valley has been the birthplace of many of the largest and fastest growing electronics firms in the world and a number of new industrial sectors.' The technologies these firms commercialized have had a significant impact on many aspects of social and economic life. To facilitate the commercialization, a set of institutions evolved in Silicon Valley to nurture the new firms; these were established to exploit the potential for rapid growth stemming from electronics innovations. The observation that technologies and places have histories and that these histories matter is, by itself, unremarkable (see Bassanini & Dosi, chap. 2, this volume). If, to invert Voltaire's (1999) Dr. Pangloss, it is accepted that the current situation is not necessarily the best of all possible worlds; then we would leave the world of microeconomics and enter a world of struggle, strategy, and serendipity, in which human beings working alone