Nanodistricts in the United States: Metropolitan Trajectories and Clustering (December 2007)

There are a number of theories that suggest emerging technologies will not be distributed equally across a region, rather they will be concentrated in certain locations. If this is the case, this distribution has implications for where future economic opportunities as well as future risks will be concentrated. In this paper, we probe nanotechnology (hereafter nano) research and commercialization at a regional level. The aim of this research is to examine the top 30 "nanodistricts" or metropolitan areas in the US with more than 1000 nanopublications in the 1990-2006 timeframe. We explore the factors underlying the emergence of these metropolitan areas into this top class through exploratory cluster analysis. We find that while most of the leading nanodistricts are similar to top cities in previous rounds of emerging technologies, there is also the surfacing of new geographic concentrations of nanotechnology research. Some of the latter types of nanodistricts are found in nontraditional places for new technology development that have large concentrations of research at a single government facility or university research institution. This finding suggests that concentrated investments in nanotechnology R&D into a single institution can elevate the profile of a region that has lacked previous technological prominence. However, questions are raised as to whether nanotechnology-related knowledge will be able to be exploited and commercialized in these new research locations.