Göran Lindqvist

2020 was the year when the COVID-19 outbreak became a global pandemic. In this book, researchers from the Stockholm School of Economics share their conclusions about how individuals, organizations and societies can meet the challenges of the pandemic and not only recover from its impact but also improve on where we were before — in short, to bounce back better.

This report investigates the potential contribution of clusters and cluster policies in the design and implementation of Smart Specialisation Strategies. Both cluster policies and Smart Specialisation Strategies are policy approaches with a place-based dimension, aiming at exploiting advantages of proximity to promote economic growth and competitiveness. With regions across Europe currently working on their Smart Specialisation Strategies, the question whether and how clusters and cluster policies can be used in this endeavour is highly relevant. Smart Specialisation Strategies are difficult to design and implement because they are based on a new and complex academic framework that now has to be translated into policy practice. The contention of this report is that lessons learnt from the rich history of cluster policies can provide concrete inputs into the development of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3).

This paper contributes to the literatures on entrepreneurship and economic geography by investigating the effects of clusters on the survival and performance of new entrepreneurial firms where clusters are defined as regional agglomerations of related industries. We analyze firm-level data for all 4,397 Swedish firms started in the telecom and consumer electronics, financial services, information technology, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical sectors from 1993 to 2002. We find that that firms located in strong clusters create more jobs, higher tax payments, and higher wages to employees. These effects are consistent for absolute agglomeration measures (firm or employee counts), but weaker for relative agglomeration measures (location quotients). The strengths of the effects are found to vary depending on which geographical aggregation level is chosen for the agglomeration measure.

Clusters are spatial agglomerations of firms in related industries. Although industry clusters have existed for centuries, the cluster concept has only recently been formulated in economic terms and has begun to attract considerable interest from scholars and policymakers over the last 20 years. A vast literature has examined all kinds of clusters and how clustering relates to innovation, growth, and other forms of economic performance of firms and regions. The cluster concept has provided a framework for thousands of national, regional, and local initiatives around the world. Yet, both research and policy efforts have yielded varying and sometimes contradictory results. This dissertation revisits some of the most basic questions about clusters. Using an approach that treats agglomeration and proximity effects as separate but related phenomena, it examines three fundamental aspects of clusters. First, it proposes a way to measure agglomeration more accurately and presents more detailed data on clusters in Europe than have previously been available. Second, it analyses the benefits of clusters for new firms and for regions. Third, it examines how clusters are “organised” through cluster initiatives. The results presented here carry implications for the study of clusters in economic geography, strategic management, and cluster policy research. They also contribute to our knowledge of cluster organisations and are of interest to both policymakers and cluster practitioners. Göran Lindqvist is a researcher at the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Stockholm School of Economics. He has published books and articles about clusters and cluster policy, and he has conducted numerous cluster-related projects for international and national public agencies in Europe and the USA.

As clusters have developed from an analytical concept into a key policy tool, numerous cluster initiatives, or collaborative organizations designed to enhance the competitiveness of clusters, have been implemented across the globe. However, while research on clusters is abundant, research specifically focusing on these emerging organizations is scant to date. This paper analyzes one such cluster initiative and its cluster, and in particular examines to what degree the public and private sectors (1) have the same understanding of the cluster's competitiveness and underlying strengths and weaknesses and (2) what activities the cluster initiative should conduct.