This article studies entrepreneurial activities emerging out of one of Germany’s most prominent dot.com firms: Intershop, a maker of e-commerce software. We show that Intershop spawned at least 30 spin-offs. The majority entered locally, giving rise to a small but growing software cluster...

Wind energy-related employment has been surging recently in Germany: it rose from 9200 in 1997 to 90,000 in 2007 and is estimated to be 112,000 in 2020. The industry particularly emerged in coastal, Northern Germany. Recently, big hopes have been particularly set on the offshore wind energy...

This paper studies the impact of an existing industrial structure in a region on the number of start-ups in this region. The aim is to detect path-dependencies in the regional industry structure. To this end we study empirically the regional factors that influence start-up rates. The approach...

Wind energy-related employment has been surging recently in Germany: it rose from 9,200 in 1997 to 90,000 in 2007 and is estimated to be 112,000 in 2020. The industry particularly emerged in coastal, northern Germany. Recently big hopes are particularly set on the offshore wind energy industry....

There is increasing recognition that the existence of clusters can only be understood when studying their dynamics over time (Audretsch and Feldman 1996; Pouder and St. John 1996; Swann et al. 1998; Maggioni 2002; Brenner 2004; Iammarino and McCann 2006; Menzel and Fornahl 2010; Ter Wal and Boschma 2011). In fact, clusters...

Das Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Wirtschaftssystemen Jena führte im Sommer 2002 in Kooperation mit dem Lehrstuhl für Mikroökonomik der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena eine Befragung der in Jena ansässigen Unternehmen durch. Die wichtigsten bereits erkennbaren Ergebnisse...

The paper Investigates stability and change of regional economic activities in the long-run. As the unit of analysis we selected the machine tool industry in West Germany for the years 1953 to 2002. We spot a strong variance in the activities between the different regions. These differences are...

We present a model that explains how the very cluster dynamics is both the driver for the movement of a cluster through a life cycle and the reason why this movement differs from the industry life cycle. The model is based on two key processes: the first is that the emergence, growth, decline...