The Long History of America's Leading High-Tech Hubs

Lots of places have want to become the "next Silicon Valley." But that's much easier said than done, according to a new study from the Kauffman Foundation.

The study, from Kauffman's Dane Stangler, compares the location of leading high-tech hubs, based on their start-up density, in 2010 and 1990, and finds that little has changed. The nation's leading tech hubs in 2010 are more or less the same as they were twenty years earlier. Drawing from a concept first introduced by the economist Paul David, who uses the example of the persistence of the established yet inconvenient QWERTY keyboard, the study argues that leading tech clusters are highly "path-dependent." The report references and builds upon the study from Engine's Ian Hathaway and the Kauffman Foundation on leading high-tech centers, which I wrote about here last month.