In overall rankings, based on economic concentration in the high-tech industries and their total economic output, Tucson ranked 40. Tucson's Raytheon Systems' missile production headquarters makes about 37 percent of the total U.S. output of guided missiles, space vehicles and parts. Those numbers put Tucson at the top of the list for guided missiles, space vehicles and parts. The city ranked 20th in terms of high-tech job and industry growth. Much of the growth in productivity of the past 25 years can be traced to high technology.
Workers benefit by having the opportunity to move next door to another position. . . .
New processes and product innovations within a cluster can be shared through informal relationships. The Silicon Valley, to the surprise of no one, is the runaway high technology leader in the United States. The area has Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Cisco Systems, Oracle, and Silicon Graphics, to name a few. More than 279,000 people in that metro region are employed by such firms, and the production accounts for 5.8 percent of the total national high-tech output. The high-tech economy does pose risks for metropolitan areas, according to the report.