The Sustainability of Clusters - Consequences of Different Governance Regimes of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Cluster Initiatives

Local Management of National Cluster Policies: Comparative Case Studies of Japanese, German, and French Biotechnology Clusters

“…While the latter explores the role of cluster organizations with international comparisons, only a few investigate local cluster management in detail [25,26,37]. Moreover, as far as we know, no studies explicitly address the relationship between national cluster policies and local cluster management with international comparisons.…”

“…Some studies distinguish between top-down and bottom-up clusters [23,36] or spontaneous and policy-driven clusters [24]. Bottom-up or spontaneous clusters are initiated, driven, and financed mainly by local firms seeking to benefit from positive externalities, whereas top-down or policy-driven clusters are publicly initiated and funded, driven mostly by policymakers [26].…”

“…Thus, we distinguish between private-driven clusters, in which numerous small biotechnology ventures with high research capabilities spontaneously agglomerate, and public-driven clusters initiated and supported by public research institutes and local authorities (these are similar to industry-driven and research-driven clusters [25]). We assume that our concepts of private-driven and public-driven clusters cover those of bottom-up and top-down clusters, respectively [26]. In Section 3.1, we discuss how the basic conditions differ across clusters and countries in more detail, and then classify each cluster and country into one of these types.…”

“…Some studies distinguish between top-down and bottom-up clusters [23], spontaneous and policy-driven clusters [24], or research-driven and industry-driven clusters [25]. Jungwirth and Müller [26] argue that governance regimes, which differ between top-down and bottom-up clusters, should conform to cluster managers' tasks. However, these studies do not explicitly investigate the relationship between national cluster policies and cluster management.…”

The Performance of Clusters - an Analysis of the Impact of Cluster Context, Structure, and Functioning on Cluster Performance

“…Planning security is particularly reflected in the security of regulatory and political conditions as well as in financial resource munificence (David & Han, 2004;Turrini et al, 2010). As a cluster's financial resources ordinarily stem from contributions of public funding authorities and of private firms, the cluster management has to convince these stakeholders to ensure financial planning security (Jungwirth & Mueller, 2010). If planning security is lacking, neither the cluster managers nor the member firms have incentives to actively engage in the promotion of the cluster as they fear sunk costs in case of cluster failure (Bell, Tracey, & Heide, 2009).…”