Searching for Investments in the Nine High Technology Clusters

Our interest in writing this article is to create a bridge between the scholarly and academic research on technological innovation and a private sector, for-profit business model that implements the ideas on innovation and entrepreneurship, primarily in metro regional economies. In this article we address how having a way to categorize innovation is important to identifying investment opportunities, both for the start-up firms and for the existing small manufacturing firms that are delivering new products to the market. We conclude that the Feser technological affinities model is useful for describing how to target technology investments, but that most metro regions lack an adequate private capital market mechanism for facilitating investments. We argue that each metro region needs to create: 1. New Asset Backed Packages of Investment Securities to accommodate the innovation process of small firms. 2. The new investment packages must be distributed on New Small Market Exchange Mechanisms. 3. New Regional Closed End Mutual Funds to supplement the very fragmented venture capital and angel capital investment framework in each metro region in order to promote the continual capital reinvestment process