The paper explores the potential for inter-sectoral technology flows in industrial clusters in Germany. With the help of a product-embodied R&D flow matrix, calculated using data on input–output tables and sectoral R&D employment, we construct industrial cluster based networks of...

Regional politicians regard the cluster concept as a key factor for promoting regional economic performance. They refer to a comprehensive set of theoretical and empirical literature which provides the clusters’ positive impact on regional development. Recent studies dealing with that...

Strong regional clusters are increasingly seen as a response to economic globalization by policy makers and regional development agencies. The reasoning of competitive advantages of countries and regions with enterprises organized in clusters has mainly been popularized by Porter (1990, 1998,...

The EU Framework Programme (FP) belongs to the most important instruments promoting transnational collaborative R&D projects in Europe. Its main objective is to initiate cross-border complementarities in order to exploit knowledge resources and to conduct large scale research. Within the EU FPs...

This paper explores the impact of industrial clusters on regional growth at level of German labour market regions within a regional convergence model. It focuses on vertically connected industrial sectors, which can emerge parallel to horizontal interconnections. Based on works of Schnabl (2000)...

The paper deals with a new approach in German innovation policy that organizes contests of initiatives for public funds. Based on an overview of the different programs we investigate the advantages and problems of such an approach. We find that this type of policy may have a large impact and...

There is a broad consent that the extent, quality as well as the success of innovation activity is critically dependent on the generation and the application of knowledge. It is also widely recognized that innovation processes have a pronounced regional dimension and that the conditions for...

We apply a multi-level approach to analyze the effect of three groups of determinants on new firm formation simultaneously: industry, location and changes over time. The data are for West Germany and cover the 1983-97 period. Our analysis indicates, that innovation activities and the...

This paper investigates the impact of new firms’ quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation to sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment...

Studies for established market economies such as West Germany (Fritsch and Mueller, 2007), and Sweden (Andersson and Koster, 2011) have shown that regional start-up rates tend to show a relatively high level of persistence and path dependency over periods of 10-15 years. One main reason for this...