From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry
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BOOK REVIEW
From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry David G McKendrick, Richard F Doner and Stephan Haggard Stanford: Stanford University Press; 2000
Reviewed by: Jan Annerstedt Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, DK-2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark E-mail: [email protected]
Journal of International Business Studies (2003), 34, 409–411. doi:10.1057/palgrave. jibs.8400046
With globalization, a modern ‘new geography’ of manufacturing and related industrial innovation seems to have emerged. Sciencebased inventions and high-tech innovations are shaped by business firms increasingly involved in world-wide competition. Yet, many of the industrial and other capabilities that influence new technology-based innovations seem localized to particular geographic areas that include a large science park with a research-based university, an urban industrial estate, a metropolitan high-tech zone, a region with a relatively high concentration of focused industrial research, etc. In short, innovative capabilities seem to be anchored and shaped in particular areas, where the new products are born and nurtured before being launched on the global market. In North America as in Europe, there is a far-reaching, yet relatively small ‘archipelago of innovation islands’ where many of the new products and processes in manufacturing industry and related services are being shaped (Hilpert, 1992). According to recent surveys (by OECD and EU) it appears to be a strong geographic concentration of R&D performance and related innovative activity within the most industrialized economies (European Commission, 2002). And, so it seems, there are areas on the two continents where radical, industry-related innovations rarely are being developed, if at all. The recent book by David McKendrick, Richard Doner, and Stephan Haggard ‘From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry’ addresses the intricate issues of localized innovation and manufacturing in the world economy. It is a detailed study of a dynamic segment of the electronics industry that has ‘gone global’ with regard to manufacturing as well as innovation. Nevertheless, this industry remains very much regionally based, supported by advanced business networks locally and across nations and continents, as the title indicates. In short, the book is about the spatial concentration of manufacturing and innovative capabilities among business firms and supporting institutions, while considering global manufacturing issues. As the hard disk drives (or any new device in the electronic industry) are being developed and the manufacturing capabilities
Book Review
Jan Annerstedt
410
grow, the industry tends to get organized into at least two different major activity lines linking firms and supporting institutions: The authors call the first one Technological Clusters, centered on the activities needed to support
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