Over the past decades, economic and innovation policy across Europe moved in the direction of creating regional clusters of related firms and institutions. Creating clusters through public policy is risky, complex and costly, however. Moreover, it is not necessary to rely on clusters to...

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionary economic geography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionary economics, namely the Nelson-Winter framework, which blends Darwinian concepts and metaphors (especially variety, selection, novelty and inheritance) and...

The widely studied concept of clusters has been usually treated as pre-established and successful structures. We argue that clusters are not pre-established but emerge through a double competition process of technological and regional nature. Moreover, faced to a changing environment they are...

In the study of industrial clusters, the relative importance, and possible interrelationship, of inter-firm cooperation in production and broad knowledge transfers (both unintentional spillovers and intentional sharing) have long been disputed. To shed light on this we study ceramic tableware...

The economic return of cluster policies has been recently called into question. Essentially based on a “one size fits all” approach consisting in boosting R&D collaborations and reinforcing network density in regions, cluster policies are suspected to have failed in reaching their...