Abstract
Besides traditional market failures in the provision of innovation, cluster policies are motivated by the existence of network failures in the coordination of innovative activities. Their aim is to encourage knowledge collaborations in order to extract a higher benefit from otherwise separated and complementary knowledge blocks. Largely implemented in developed economies, cluster policies are nowadays called into question and their assessment remains quite controversial. Their ‘one size fits all’ dimension does not necessarily match with the heterogeneity of geographical, technological, and historical contexts in which they are fulfilled, and can suffer from information asymmetries between funders and funded. Therefore, another failure arises—the government failure—which calls for a context-based approach to cluster policies. These should consist of surgical interventions on well-defined network failures rather than of a general spreading of public subsidies aimed at unconditionally increasing network density in clusters.
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Vicente, J. (2018). Opportunities and Weaknesses of Cluster Policy. In: Economics of Clusters. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78870-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78870-8_5
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