I've been commenting over at the Conglomerate on Vic Fleischer's post on how to grow the next Silicon Valley. It comes in response to another essay saying that it takes nerds + rich people to make a Silicon Valley, and you need a way to be able to get lots of both before one can sprout.
This brought to mind the work of AnnaLee Saxenian, whose work comparing Silicon Valley with the 128 corridor in Massachusetts we read in one of my undergraduate sociology classes. According to her, it takes more than nerds to get a Silicon Valley. You need to have an organizational structure that can maximize all that nerd power (to paraphrase rather crudely...)
I suddenly am interested in reading her book... (Perhaps post-bar?) But it is pretty cool that I still remember it. I think it's been at least 11 years since I took that class... (I also wonder if I'd perhaps worked from an earlier paper, since the copyright date listed on the book is a year after I remember taking the course.)