manufacturing clusters, these clusters have emerged typically in developing countries. They have been characterized by the availability of lower-cost skills and expertise serving a growing global demand for increasingly commoditized (i.e. standardized, less firm-specific) knowledge services, e.g. software development, engineering support, analytical services. Examples include Bangalore, India; Recife, Brazil; Shanghai, China. Multinational corporations have played an important role in "customizing" business conditions in these clusters. One example for this is the establishment of collaborative linkages with local universities to secure the supply of qualified, yet lower-cost engineers. Process The process of identifying, defining, and describing a cluster is not standardized. Individual economic consultants and researchers develop their own methodologies. All cluster analysis relies on evaluation of local and regional employment patterns, based on industrial categorizations such as NAICS or the increasingly obsolete SIC codes. Notable databases providing statistical data on clusters and industry agglomeration include: The Cluster Mapping Project (for the USA), conducted by the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School The European Cluster Observatory (for Europe), managed by the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Stockholm School of Economics An alternative to clusters, reflecting the distributed nature of business operations in the wake of globalization, is hubs and nodes. The Silicon Valley case In the mid- to late 1990s several successful computer technology related companies emerged in Silicon Valley in California. This led anyone who wished to create a startup company to do so in Silicon Valley. The surge in the number of Silicon Valley startups led to a number of venture capital firms relocating to or expanding their Valley offices. This in turn encouraged more entrepreneurs to locate their startups there. In other words, venture capitalists (sellers of finance) and dot-com startups (buyers of finance) "clustered" in and around a geographical area. The cluster effect in the capital market also led to a cluster effect in the labor market. As an increasing number of companies started up in Silicon Valley, programmers, engineers etc. realized that they would find greater job opportunities by moving to Silicon Valley. This concentration of technically skilled people in the valley meant that startups around the country knew that their chances of finding job candidates with the proper skill-sets were higher in the valley, hence giving them added incentive to move there. This in turn led to more high-tech workers moving there. Similar effects have also been found in the