Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981–2001)

This article tells the early story of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (CTS) as a site of innovation. It argues that, along with economic and scientific development goals, CTS furthered political and geopolitical change agendas for IBM and Mexico. These included reorganizing labor around global supply chains and maintaining specific power dynamics between the Global North and South. Throughout the nineties, CTS was key in Mexico's innovation project. It operated as a laboratory for business models built directly on computing supply chains and was an example of successful industry-academia alliances. However, not everyone in the cluster benefited from Mexico's search for innovation. The country's innovation policies involved the adoption of “outsourcing”—a flexible labor regime that remade labor in the cluster by weakening workers’ rights. In so doing, the article also explores the logistical dimension of the prototype and innovation.