Ching Kwan Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan. She is author of Gender and the South China Miracle (University of California Press, 1998). Her current research is on the transformation of the Chinese working class under market reform.

Topics to be covered: 1. Case Studies of different ventures undertaken by the speaker for different projects in China, looking at reasons for the organization structure, access to local capital, technology and talent, infrastructure availability and government relations; and outcomes relative to expectations. 2. Comparative view of India 3. Summary of how capitalism is managed in China versus India. Mr. Vivek Ragavan, who has more than twenty years of executive management experience in the telecommunications industry, was most recently president and CEO of Redback Networks. Before that he was president and CEO of Siara Systems, which merged with Redback in March 2000. Prior to Siara, Ragavan was president of the Residential Broadband Group of ADC Telecommunications, Inc., where he was responsible for ADC's telecommunication equipment businesses, focused on the broadband communication access and transport markets. Earlier, Ragavan was vice president of Engineering at General Instrument where he led the development of that company's leading digital video transport system. He has a BSEE from Northwestern University and an MSEE from Cornell University.

This seminar addresses developing an analytical framework for a comparative study of the emergence and growth dynamics of regions of high tech industrial clusters in different national contexts. We review the empirical and theoretical literature on determinants of national and regional competitiveness in high tech industries. We conclude that, while innovation and entrepreneurship have both been given increasing attention in various international benchmarking studies in recent years, their interaction and joint effects on economic dynamism -- especially at the regional and specific industrial cluster level -- have not been well-investigated. Moreover, while the number of empirical studies of specific high-tech regions has increased, especially in the United States, the influence of different national contexts and international linkages has received inadequate attention. To address these gaps, we propose the development of conceptual measures and empirical benchmark indicators that focus specifically on the regional nexus of innovation and entrepreneurship, and identify possible secondary data sources and primary data collection methodology for deriving these indicators. Some preliminary benchmarking findings comparing a number of Asian nations/regions with Silicon Valley are presented.

Poh-Kam Wong is an associate professor at the Business School, National University of Singapore, where he directs the Centre for Management of Innovation and Technopreneurship. He obtained his BSc., MSc. and Ph.D. from MIT. His current research interests include management of technological innovation, S&T policy, and high tech entrepreneurship. His publications have appeared in, among others, Information Systems Research, International Journal of Technology Management, Journal of Asian Business, and Industry and Innovation, as well as chapters in books published by Stanford University Press, MIT Press, and Oxford University Press. He has consulted widely for international agencies, government agencies in Singapore, and high tech firms in Asia. He has co-founded three technology companies and currently serves on the advisory board or board of directors of several high tech start-ups in Singapore and Malaysia. He is an advisor to two VC funds and chairman of the Business Angel Network (South East Asia). He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley in 1984 and is currently on sabbatical leave as a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC.

Professor Root's research project on Korea's prospects concludes that Korea can not be secure against future economic crisis without structural reform of finance, enterprise, and labor markets. Will Korea be strong enough to undertake untried, high-risk, long-term structural reform? In this seminar, he anticipates the levels of reform under current conditions and offers an alternative approach with better sustained growth prospects. Professor Root's research is focused on governmental transition and the political economy of growth, development policy; theory and practice; and social theory. He was chief consultant on governance at the Asian Development Bank from 1994 to 1997 where he initiated the restructuring of the public administration of Sri Lanka. His most recent books include Small Countries, Big Lessons: Governance and Rise of East Asia (Oxford University Press, 1996) and with Edgardo Campos, The Key to the Asian Miracle, Making Shared Growth Credible (Brookings Institution, 1996) For more information about the program please call (650) 723-8387.