Industrial Cluster Innovation Research Articles

From Local Experiments to National Policy: The Origins of China's Distinctive Policy Process

China's national policy formulation undergone economic transformation and shaped the making of policies in promotion of private business and stock market regulation. China's distinctive process of central-local interaction in policy generation is one of its core strengths in reforming its economy.

Issues in modelling innovation intense environments: The importance of the historical and cultural context

Since the 1970s the number of developments labelled as innovation intense environments has increased at an exponential rate. Innovation intense environments are defined here as those spaces that are purported to accelerate the rate of innovation and the proliferation of high technology industries. A number of academic fields now study existing innovation intense environments like Silicon Valley, in order to explain how they are constituted and how they can be replicated. Over the years a wide variety of model innovation intense environments has been proposed including: science park, technopolis, information city, milieu, industry cluster and regional innovation system. These different models are compared and analysed in terms of their portrayal of appropriate form, core innovation dynamics and policy recommendations. The discussion of models is then placed within the post-war history of the most famous innovation intense environment—Silicon Valley. It is concluded that such models must be well grounded within a specific historic and cultural context in order to function as useful analytic tools.

Innovation and employment growth in industrial clusters: evidence from aeronautical firms in Germany*

This article investigates the impact of various agglomeration forces on employment and innovation for a sample of aeronautical cluster firms in Northern Germany and a control group of geographically dispersed aeronautical firms in other German regions. The findings suggest that employment growth is positively affected by labor market pooling but this effect is not cluster‐specific. The firms' probability of innovating is positively influenced by knowledge flows from proximate scientific institutions and public information sources as well as demanding local customers. However, only the effect of demanding customers is cluster‐specific.

National innovation systems, firm strategy, and enabling mobile communications: the case of Nokia

An important element of the growing e–economy is the emergence of firms in the telecommunications sector and the ways in which these are evolving, competing and attempting to capture markets based on strategic goals. A key aspect is the ‘wireless’ or ‘mobile’ telephony phenomenon, which has attracted users across the globe and is gaining importance as new developments linking it to the internet are realised. Utilising the perspectives of competitive advantage and national innovation systems theory, our work examines the evolution of Nokia’s mobile phones and mobile, fixed and internet protocol (IP) networks divisions. The success of the firm can be attributed to a variety of factors. Among the most important are employment of the innovative industrial cluster concept, networking, and state promotion of an emerging information and communication technology (ICT) cluster through the liberalisation of the telephony market. Within the firm itself identification of core competencies (digital signal processing, electronics manufacturing, software platforms and architectures) and the development of niche markets has been important. A major factor in the success has been the ability to evolve technology and to place leading edge innovative products in the market in a timely fashion.

What Makes Knowledge Tacit? - On the Evolution of Knowledge-based Industrial Clusters

Geographical clusters of innovative activity are mediums for the efficient transfer of tacit and its effective translation into innovation. Their force of attraction stems from their ability to lower variable costs in innovative processes. Lower variable costs are the result of extensive investments in a common fixed asset: the economic and social structure of a cluster. The evolution of innovative industrial clusters is studied with an analytical framework, established on thermodynamic theory, that models the tradeoff between fixed costs and variable costs. We identify tacit as noise sensitive high-fixed-cost knowledge and demonstrate with the help of the analytical framework that it is more efficiently transmitted locally. Through the existence of a common context, geographic clusters reduce the effect of noise and make the transmission and application of tacit more efficient. Many properties of innovative clusters emerge as natural consequences of economic evolution, which inherently is a thermodynamic process. Our model has implications on the formulation of innovation policies and strategic industrial policies in general.

New Challenges for Industrial Policy in a Knowledge-Based Economy: Toward a Regional Innovation System

Regional innovation systems(RIS) have been put emphasis on as new industrial development strategy in a knowledge-based economy. This paper, examine new directions of industrial policy with regard to the RIS. With the impotance of innovation system, industrial cluster, and inter-firm networks for industrial development, new directions of industrial policy in Korea is suggested as follows; ¤ To make policy efforts to foster firm networks, ¤Ł To be balance of regarding policies designed for fostering competition and promoting collaboration, ¤Ø To establish a regional innovation system with which to boost industrial clusters(or districts). The RIS model for regional industry development is outlined in this paper but policy initiatives for building a RIS have to be extracted from further studies.