Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

In this paper, six emerging strands of high-technology theory are reviewed, and are compared with each other for their utility and relevance to public policy. Although each has different particular strengths and weaknesses, their general determinism and reliance on market environments are found to be at odds with a conception of high technology as essentially an uncertain, premarket, or extramarket, phenomenon in which institutions, individuals, and place have key roles. The conclusion is that a more appropriate framework, such as a high-tech version of ‘adjustment theory’, would emphasize instead a central role for state activity in managing uncertainty, the importance of decisions by limited key individuals, and the historicogeographical characteristics of local settings.

After a discussion of the nature and definition of high-technology industry, original evidence on the recent (1981–84) regional and local evolution of high-technology industrial employment in Britain is presented. The case of the Cambridge Phenomenon is reviewed in detail, drawing upon a range of recent research to document the scale, nature, and impacts of rapid high-technology growth in the Cambridge region, especially in the 1980s. The volume of such growth in the period 1981–84 was greater in Cambridgeshire than in any other county of Britain. The reasons for Cambridge's exceptional performance are discussed, and to conclude there is a brief consideration of policy issues arising from the region's experience, including the role of universities and science parks, of government defence and procurement policies, of local small-firm assistance structures, and of selective help to ‘threshold’ firms.

One of the features that Australia has in common with other countries has been the encouragement of clusters of high-technology firms or technology-oriented complexes (TOCs). In Australia, the primary mechanism for promoting TOCs has been technology parks. In this paper the purpose is to review technology park developments in Australia from a perspective which emphasises some key conceptual features of the literature in this area: Agglomeration economies of high-technology firms and firm–university interaction; the creation of new high-technology complexes; and locational factors which make technology parks attractive to high-technology companies. Three Australian case studies, based on interviews with high-technology firms, are reported. One of the key findings from the research is that if Australian technology parks are aiming to establish TOCs that exhibit a high level of interaction between the park and a host university, then the present situation in Australia is far removed from this goal.

The encouragement of minority entrepreneurship is frequently advocated as a means of promoting social and economic development. The Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company (MESBIC) program pursues this goal by increasing the access of minority business enterprise (MBE) to both human and financial capital. This research provides an exploratory empirical description of the regional, industrial sector, and funding-stage preferences of MESBICs. It is concluded that these preferences are largely antithetical to the formation and expansion of MBEs in growth sectors that offer the market potential for entrepreneurial takeoff. The primary problem seems to be the small size of the majority of MESBICs. Policies governing licensing requirements and administration should therefore be reconsidered.

In this paper a model of the spatial development of the American venture capital industry is provided. The investment preferences for both publicly and privately owned venture capital firms for the period 1970–85 are examined in light of this model. A median polish analysis of the investment preferences, for firms located in the sixteen largest venture capital centers, reveals a high level of regional parochialism in investment. Differences in risk aversion and industry choice are also found both by city type and by firm type. Implications for local development are discussed.

The well-known argument that high-technology industry polarizes the work force appears to be an extrapolation primarily from two patterns: The occupational characteristics of the semiconductor industry, and the seeming occupational polarization of the US economy as a whole. The proposition that high-technology industry is responsible for the polarization of work forces is operationalized and statistically assessed in this paper. Operating from a definition of ‘high technology’ used by government agencies, a county-level analysis of the relation between employment in high-technology firms and in various higher-skill and lower-skill occupations reveals only limited empirical support for the ‘high-technology work force polarization’ (hereafter HTWFP) argument. This suggests that generalizations about the occupational impacts of high technology have been overdrawn, and that further research should focus less on extrapolating to the general case and more on examining and comparing a variety of high-technology industries and their relationships to local labor-markets.