Report: Motor City, Silicon Valley becoming more alike

GM headquarters in Detroit, left, and
Google HQ in Silicon Valley, right.
Photo/Getty AP

Relying on a recent Brookings report, Fortune Magazine makes the case that the Motor City and Silicon Valley are growing more similar than most think.
Increasingly, manufacturing has gone high-tech in Detroit, while the Silicon Valley/San Jose region has seen an uptick in manufacturing. Brookings compiled a list of 50 advanced industries, ranging from automobile manufacturing to software development. Together, those two industries contain our nation’s most competitive and innovative firms, according to Fortune.
On a nationwide basis these industries have an outsized impact on the economy -- only about 10 percent of the workforce, but 17 percent of gross domestic product. Since the end of the Great Recession, advanced industries have created about two-thirds of new jobs.

Silicon value is known for its high-tech research and development, as well as industries tied to science and math. But this is not the mecca of Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Detroiters would be amazed to learn that nearly half of the jobs in the Valley are of the manufacturing variety. Fortune reports that these 134,000 workers produce semiconductors, computer equipment, aerospace parts and pharmaceuticals.

Here's more from Fortune:
"The reverse dynamic is at play in Detroit. While the automotive industry accounts for over one-third of all advanced industry employment, services still employ almost half. Over 32,000 professionals in the Detroit metro area are employed in the computer systems design sector alone -- many of which feed into the larger automotive supply chain.
"Still, even this data obscures just how much the business of innovation is changing —and how firms are responding.
"General Motors remains one of the largest employers in Detroit, mostly within automotive manufacturing. But increasingly, the automaker has also been getting into the software space, according to patenting data, which shows that GM filed 592 software patents over the past five years, accounting for over 15 percent of their patenting activity."