This book grew out of a collaboration between scholars affiliated with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and business people interested in the fundamental sources of economic growth. A series of conferences at Stanford, attended by the authors of the essays and by business people linked to SIEPR, set the goal of this book – understanding the formation of new regional clusters of innovative activity like Silicon Valley.

Our writing team included Stanford-affiliated economists Tim Bresnahan, Kevin Davis, Michael Horvath, and Scott Wallsten; business people and entrepreneurs, notably Ralph Landau and Gordon Moore; and management specialists and economists from other universities or institutions who work on the development of technology clusters, including AnnaLee Saxenian from the University of California at Berkeley (and SIEPR), Suma Athreye from The Open University in London, Ashish Arora from Carnegie Mellon University (and SIEPR), Erran Carmel from American University, Catherine de Fontenay from the University of New South Wales, Alfonso Gambardella from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, John Richards from McKinsey & Co. (and SIEPR), and Salvatore Torrisi from the Università di Camerino. As editors, we want to acknowledge the authors' patience with our continuous requests for changes; clarifications; and rearrangements of writing, thoughts, or ideas, which we hope helped improve the chapters and make the book as a whole more coherent. AnnaLee Saxenian, Ralph Landau, and Scott Wallsten helped with the editorial process and, most important, provided stimulating comments to our own concluding chapter.