Investigation of the Nature of the Economic Cluster as a Quasintegration Form of a Spatial Organization of Economic Activity

Abstract

The growing global competition, as well as other factors of the changing economic situation are shifting the investors attention from countries as a whole to the territories and regions in which the synergistic effect of the interaction of various-scale enterprises not only increases the individual performance efficiency of each company but develops a significant innovative potential of their integration and creation of new competitive innovative products. Therefore, the rigid centric structures of administrative management with a response only to the price signals cease to respond to the demands of reality and are replaced by a more flexible and integrated model of building links - network interaction. Russian companies are highly interested in the accumulated experience of foreign countries in tooling search for cluster initiatives, their development, including the intra-cluster structure, and their support taking into consideration the whole spectrum of factors that both contribute to and hinder the viability of the cluster. The article presents a brief analysis of the cluster concept development, examines the present-day systems of managing the cluster-network interaction. It offers the author's definition of the cluster.