Innovation and Location: A Case Study of Sony’s Vaio Laptop

This article investigates the question of why innovation has been geographically concentrated. Although many past studies of regional institutions, social networks, and tacit knowledge have provided insight into this question, they have done little to probe the engineering and technical aspects of the phenomenon of the placerootedness of innovation. This study approaches this question through an empirical analysis of innovation at the micro-scale, a case study in the product development of Sony’s Vaio 505 laptop. It uncovers three specific features in the process of innovation: complexity, the interdisciplinary development of technology, and prototyping and testing. Each of these engineering and technical aspects requires the co-location of the engineers and managers of the innovation project.