|
Chapter 28 Regional Origins of the New Economy Among the various definitions of the entrepreneur, many economists rely on Joseph Schumpeter’s touchstone: innovation. Some types of innovation are almost routinely generated in Fortune 500 R&D labs and blend more or less seamlessly into corporate strategy. Other types overturn industries and redistribute wealth and power among regions and nations. This article recalls the disruptions and geographical shifts triggered first by the transistor and then by the microprocessor, as they led to a digital paradigm and a New Economy. The half-dozen or so entrepreneurs popularly identified with the birth of the New Economy hailed from the western half of the U.S., far from the traditional centers of American computing. This entrepreneurial creativity from “the provinces” (meaning places far from the nation’s 19th-century industrialization) gave the U.S. internal sources of revitalization absent from such other advanced economies as Germany and Japan. |