Nanotech Business Location Research

UCLA scholars have been studying the economics and sociology of high tech inventions to chart where the centers of the next wave of submicro (nanotechnology) innovation may be located.

Economist Michael Darby and sociologist Lynne Zucker have spent much of the last decade studying the rise of industries based on exotic new technologies. They have published widely on gene splicing and genetic engineering. Recently they have turned their attention to the promise of nanotechnology, the submicro world of machines made of a handful of atoms.

One of their conclusions was: "Where commercial opportunity is built on fast-advancing academic science it is generally more economical to establish commercial laboratories and even manufacturing facilities near the universities than to try to move the scientists and their network to an existing firm location." The two strongest factors Darby and Zucker discovered in predicting strong science bases in a given region are the number of top scientists at nearby universities and the existence of a large pool of highly skilled workers, this last measured by local wage scales. "Firms enter nanotechnology," they write, "near where top scientists are making breakthrough discoveries and where skill levels in the work force are high."

More here.