AnnaLee Saxenian is a professor and the current Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information

UC Berkeley School of Information

The UC Berkeley School of Information or the iSchool is a graduate school offering both a professional master's degree and a research-oriented Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Berkeley. The school was created in 1994 and was known as the School of Information Management and Systems ...

, known widely for her work on technology clusters and social networks in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

.

In her book Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (1994), Saxenian proposes a hypothesis to explain why California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

's Silicon Valley was able to keep up with the fast pace of technological progress during the 1980s, while the vertically integrated firms of the Route 128

Route 128 (Massachusetts)

Route 128, also known as the Yankee Division Highway , and originally the Circumferential Highway, is a partial beltway around Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The majority of the highway is built to freeway standards, and about 3/5 of it is part of the Interstate Highway System...

 beltway fell behind. She argues that the key was Silicon Valley's decentralized organizational form, non-proprietary standards, and tradition of cooperative exchange (sharing information and outsourcing for component parts), in opposition to hierarchical and independent industrial systems in the East Coast.

Her most recent book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (2006), explores the globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

 of the technology workforce that has occurred as the "brain drain

Brain drain

Human capital flight, more commonly referred to as "brain drain", is the large-scale emigration of a large group of individuals with technical skills or knowledge. The reasons usually include two aspects which respectively come from countries and individuals...

" becomes a "brain circulation" with immigrant India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n, Chinese

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

, and Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i professionals taking the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial model to their home countries while also maintaining connections with the US.