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6221662 
Book/Book Chapter 
High-Tech Industry 
Zhou, Y 
2009 
Elsevier 
Oxford 
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography 
122-127 
High-tech industry refers to the sectors characterized by innovative or complex technology and knowledge-intensive labor force. Research on the high-tech industries was driven by the powerful globalization dynamic since the 1970s in which labor-intensive industries shifted to less-developed regions while high-tech industries experienced rapid growth in the industrialized regions. Another force in geography is the disciplinary search for new location models or considerations beyond traditional transportation costs. Geographers have found that high-tech industry offers a fertile empirical ground to generate and test new theories of innovation, spatial agglomeration, and industrial organization under the globalized and post-Fordism contexts. Different theoretical approaches have developed to advance our understanding of the role of human resources, spatial clustering, interfirm networks, regional institutions, and the state in innovation and sustained regional competitiveness. High-tech industry also attracts attention from public policy makers in both developing and developed countries, each hoping these industries become engines for regional revitalization and growth. The studies of high-tech industry in geography, while productive, tend to be biased toward developed countries, even though some newly industrialized countries have shown considerable interest in or promise of technological catch-up. These studies also have the risk of overgeneralizing certain spatial dynamics over very different industrial sectors. 
High-tech industry; Innovation milieu; Intellectual property rights; Location factors; New international division of labor; Newly industrialized economies; Post-Fordism; Spatial cluster; Tacit knowledge; Transaction costs; World system theory 
Thrift, Nigel