Transforming Industrial Complexes to Innovative Clusters? A Korean Case Study

Abstract

Global economic environment based on globalization processes caused a severe competition between the nations, and these nations launched various strategic approaches to increase their market shares in the global markets. The economic globalization process stimulates changes of technology environment that is not favor for the technology advanced nations to transfer their strategic technology areas toward developing and newly industrialized nations. Moreover, due to the change of external economic and technological environment national development strategies in all nations are also changing. In order to generate economic growth and gain a better position in severe competition between nations, the advanced nations have already established strong national and regional innovation systems The nations participating in the globalization processes actively tend to close free trade agreements (FTA) in order to intensify the movement of their production factors across the national borders as quick as possible. This new trend has cognized the importance of regions and regional competitiveness that are based on regional industries. In line with the new trend of global economies, building innovative local clusters has become one of the core strategies to develop the nations further. This frame shift has affected South Korea to a high extent because the nation cannot develop further without inventing its own core technology that costs a vast capital as well as takes a long time. This paper examines an attempt to restructure existing industrial complexes, turning them into innovative clusters at regional and local level. This contribution also tries to identify the tasks and strategies necessary to build locally embedded innovative clusters and how to best analyze these.