Abstract
Despite technological advances diminishing the role of distance, economic activity continues to be spatially concentrated. There is no better example of this than Silicon Valley in California. There are over a thousand such ‘clusters’ in Europe, many of which receive government subsidies. However, many fail to live up to their expectations, and our knowledge on what makes them successful is limited. More worryingly, there are seemingly contradictory insights, with contention existing about fundamental matters such as whether the members of clusters benefit from i) the geographic concentration of dissimilar or similar economic activities, ii) location in a cluster or the embeddedness in networks, and iii) strong formal or informal institutions.
This dissertation suggests that this lack of knowledge is a result of selective approaches to clusters in which their geographic, network, and institutional dimensions are not fully considered. Furthermore, past research has assumed that conditions independently contribute, detract from, or are insignificant to the attainment of an outcome over a single pathway. By applying a configurational lens, this dissertation breaks from this, and emphasizes clusters’ complexity. By demonstrating that there are multiple pathways to outcomes like innovation, the seemingly contradictory insights about clusters are reconciled.
