Babel Media is a company that could, in theory, be based anywhere. It provides the video games industry with outsourced services such as localisation and quality assurance. Most of its 1,000 staff need only computers and reliable internet connections to do their jobs. Yet they are concentrated in just a handful of places worldwide to take advantage of specific local conditions.
The company was founded in 1999 in Brighton, on the south coast of England, partly because the city has one of the highest concentrations of young foreign workers and students in the UK. Its latest production office was opened in 2005 in Montreal, Canada – again a source of young, multilingual talent but also, critically, home to one of the world's fastest-growing “business clusters” for video games production.
The concept of the business cluster has become an increasingly important part of regional development and corporate strategies since 1990, when Michael Porter of Harvard Business School published The Competitive Advantage of Nations. In the book and subsequent research, Prof Porter found that as more companies of the same type cluster together in the same place, so they derive more benefits from their “colocation”.
