Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Innovative-Industrial Cluster Development in the Era of Digitalization

Abstract

This article summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific debate on the identification of the main theoretical and practical principles of the functioning of innovative-industrial clusters in different countries, as well as the formalization of the impact of digitalization on their activities. The article summarizes scientific approaches to determining the main characteristics and features of the functioning of innovation-industrial clusters. In order to substantiate the theoretical background of the relationship between innovation-industrial clusters’ performance and digitalization processes, a bibliometric analysis of the main Scopus publications in this direction is carried out using the VOSviewer toolkit. That made it possible to identify the main essential and contextual clusters of scientific research on relevant topics to characterize the evolutionary patterns of their changes during the analysis period. In order to determine the empirical causality of the impact of digitalization on innovative and industrial development, an integral indicator of innovative and industrial development is developed. The Index considers the measurement parameters and regional features of industrial, entrepreneurial, and innovative development. Indicators were integrated using the principal components analysis and additive convolution. The study modelled the influence proxies of the digital economy on the integrated indicator of innovative and industrial development using panel data regression modelling in the Stata 14.2/SE software. In the paper, it is also identified those determinants of the digital development of the state that depends to the greatest extent on the volatility of the innovative and industrial development of the country using one-factor regression models. The study is conducted for the country sample with 10 countries, including Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. The time horizon of the study covers the period 2009-2021 (or the latest available period). The research results can be useful to scientists, state authorities, and local governments.