I just bought Richard Florida's book : The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. The author claims study the emergence of a new social class : creative people (researchers, architects, musician, designer, engineer...). His point is that in the old economy, people had to move from one place to where the action is (i.e. where the jobs are, where the big companies are) whereas now, companies move where creative people live (for instance, in the US : Boston, Silicon Valley...). I certainly like this claim :

While I had been studying the location decisions of hight-techn industries and talented people, Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of country's high-tech hotspots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with the highest concentrations of gay people. When we compared the two lists with greater statistical rigor, his Gay index turned out to correlate very strongly with my measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index - a measure of the density of artists, writers and performers in a region - produced similar results.

This is very close to an assumption I discussed with Fab.

-> Company growth seems to occur in places that were tolerant, diverse and open to creativity