China's Guangzhou Development District (GDD) will be the site of the new innovation cluster known as Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City. Jointly developed by GDD and Singbridge of Singapore, Knowledge City will be a new environmentally and technologically advanced city that hosts innovative industries and their associated knowledge workers. To achieve this goal, GDD must design a strategic plan to pursue three primary goals: attract high-technology companies and enable their growth; attract and retain a highly skilled, innovative workforce; and ensure the availability of innovation-oriented finance. This report first presents a portrait of high-technology firms in Guangzhou and compares Guangzhou with other Chinese cities. It then presents an analysis of three case studies — Silicon Valley, the life sciences corridor in Maryland, and the technology cluster between Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel — and describes the factors that led to their success. Finally, it provides an overview of the current innovation system in GDD and applies lessons learned from the case studies and from the literature on entrepreneurship, innovation, and cluster formation to GDD and Knowledge City. This is a companion volume to another RAND report, An Outline of Strategies for Building an Innovation System for Knowledge City (MG-1240-GDD), which outlines a strategic plan for Knowledge City and is intended to help the developers create conditions that are conducive to innovation and the commercialization of new technologies.