Technoligical Life Cycles Regional Clusters Facing Disruption

The phenomenon of technological life cycles is argued to be of great importance in the development of regional clusters. New 'disruptive' technologies may initiate the emergence of new regional industrial clusters and/or create new opportunities for further development of existing ones. However, they may also result in stagnation and decline of the latter. The term disruptive refers to such significant changes in the basic technologies that may change the industrial landscape, even in the shorter run. The paper examines the key features of a regional cluster, where the economic development patterns are quite closely related to the emergence of new key technologies.Technological life cycles, regional clusters, communication technology

Flanders Language Valley; Industrial Districts and Localized Technological Change

This case study questions how Flanders Language Valley developed as a cluster of localized technological change. Through licensing the attracted small, mostly foreign firms use the research lab of L&H Speech Products as a common source of codified knowledge and with their fast entrepreneurial reaction they complement it by developing a broad range of applications. Subsequently, the created favorable communication conditions induced innovative linkages between the attracted SMEs. Like the Silicon Valley role-model, a strong pilot firm, venture capital, education and most of all the informal networking were critical to the development of FLV. Companies ''find'' each other at FLV to their mutual advantage. They learn from each other and benefit from developing and using common pools of resources in proximity, e.g., companies find employees in the ''collective pool of labour'' created by several education and training programmes.industrial organization ;

Entry by Spinoff in a High-tech Cluster

Recently empirical studies have focused on how capabilities of new entering firms are important for the evolution of industries over time. The performance of new entrants appears to be significantly influenced by their pre-entry background. The general impression of the literature is that firms founded by former employees of successful incumbents have shown larger propensities to survive than other categories of new entrants. In the present paper, we use this approach to study the emergence and growth over the past three decades of a wireless telecommunications cluster around Aalborg in North Jutland, Denmark (NorCOM). The aim is to analyse the dominating forces behind the growth of NorCOM using detailed information about the founding events and organizational background of the individual entrants in the cluster. We show that the technological successes of firms in the region have powered a spinoff process, which can account for the majority of the growth in number of firms and employment in the cluster.Clusters, Spinoffs, Evolution of Industries, Entrepreneurs

Coming From Good Stock: Career Histories and New Venture Formation

We examine how the social structure of existing organizations influences entrepreneurship and suggest that resources accrue to entrepreneurs based on the structural position of their prior employers. We argue that information advantages allow individuals from entrepreneurially prominent prior firms to identify new opportunities. Entrepreneurial prominence also reduces the perceived uncertainty of a new venture. Using a sample of Silicon Valley start-ups, we demonstrate that entrepreneurial prominence is associated with initial strategy and the probability of attracting external financing. New ventures with high prominence are more likely to be innovators; furthermore, innovators with high prominence are more likely to obtain financing

Entrepreneurship in the Netherlands; New economy: new entrepreneurs!

Dit onderzoek beschrijft de belangrijkheid van bestaande en startende bedrijven voor de Nederlandse economie. In drie bijdragen wordt uit verschillende invalshoeken ingegaan op de relatie tussen ondernemerschap en de nieuwe economie. De effecten van ICT op het economische proces worden behandeld. Daarnaast wordt ingegaan op de vraag of de 21ste eeuw een nieuwe gouden eeuw zal zijn voor ondernemerschap. Tot slot komt de rol van kennisgerichte bedrijven in de nieuwe economie uit macro-economisch oogpunt aan de orde.

The regionalisation of innovation policy in Germany: theoretical foundations and recent experience

In recent years, not only has the network paradigm become the starting-point for policy measures aiming at a better exploitation of innovation potentials, but also the region, i.e. sub-national spatial entities, has been made an important platform for innovation policy implementation by national governments. Specifically, the cluster concept and other theoretical approaches of the new economic geography contributed to the popularisation of regional development concepts. A substantial feature of this focus on the region is that measures, which have so far had a national orientation (and for those the question about the distribution of innovative potentials in space was not or was only implicitly raised), have to be adapted to the specific structures and potential of individual regions. However, not every region in a country can develop into a high-tech island equipped with leading-edge technology, industry and research. For many regions and their economic actors, the only development option is to carry out supplementary functions for other regions, clusters and economic activities or to focus on the exploitation of endogenous potential and strengths. ... --

Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Developmental State: Lessons from the Advanced Economies

A basic intellectual challenge for those concerned with the poverty of nations is to come to grips with the nature and causes of the wealth of the world?s wealthier nations. One might then be in a position to inform the poorer nations how they might achieve similar outcomes. This paper is organized around what I call ?the theory of innovative enterprise?, a perspective derived from the historical and comparative study of the development of the advanced economies. The theory of innovative enterprise provides the essential analytical link between entrepreneurship and development. Section 2 offers, as a point of departure, a contrast between entrepreneurship in rich and poor nations. Section 3 outlines the theory of the innovating firm in which entrepreneurship has a role to play. Section 4 identifies the roles of entrepreneurship in new firm formation in terms of the types of strategy, organization, and finance that innovation requires, and emphasizes the ?disappearance? of entrepreneurship with the growth of the firm. In Section 5 I argue that, in the advanced economies, successful entrepreneurship in knowledge intensive industries has depended heavily upon a combination of business allocation of resources to innovative investment strategies, and government investment in the knowledge base, state sponsored protection of markets and intellectual property rights, and state subsidies to support these business strategies. One cannot understand national economic development without understanding the role of the developmental state. At the same time, the specific agenda and ultimate success of the developmental state cannot be understood in abstraction from the dynamics of innovative enterprise. It is through the interaction of the innovative enterprise and the developmental state that entrepreneurial activity inserts itself into the economic system to contribute to the process of economic development.entrepreneurship, innovative enterprise, developmental state

Can a teaching university be an entrepreneurial university? Civic entrepreneurship and the formation of a cultural cluster in Ashland, Oregon

There has been debate over whether a teaching university can be an entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998). In a traditional conception of academic entrepreneurship focused on achieving commercial profit, a research base may be a pre-requisite to creating spin-offs. However, if we expand entrepreneurship into a broader conception to map its different forms such as commercial, social, cultural and civic entrepreneurship, it is clear that the answer is positive. In this study, we focus on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), which has transformed a small town based on resource extraction, a market center and a rail-hub into a theatre arts and cultural cluster. The convergence of entrepreneurship, triple helix model, cluster and regional innovation theories, exemplified by the Ashland case, has provided a model as instructive as Silicon Valley, to seekers of a general theory and practice of regional innovation and entrepreneurship. The role of Southern Oregon University (SOU) in the inception of a cultural cluster gives rise to a model for education-focused universities to play a significant role in local economic development through civic entrepreneurship