Since the mid-1990s German technology policy has experienced a paradigmatic shift from standard grant schemes towards a region-oriented and competition-based R&D policy. Currently, a new policy experiment, the InterClust contest, is under way, trying to simultaneously foster place-based...

In the 21st century clusters can be observed in most developed economies. However, the scientific results regarding the effect of clusters on firm performance are highly contradictive. This inconsistency in the empirical results makes it difficult to infer general conclusions about the...

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...

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...