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The Cluster Policies Whitebook

After The Competitiveness Institute's 6th Annual Conference in Gothenburg in 2003 on the theme of ?Innovative Clusters ? A New Challenge", an international team from IKED (International Organization for the Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development) under the leadership of the President of the University of Jonkoping in Sweden, Dr. Thomas Anderson was requested by TCI to produce the Whitebook, based on the outcomes of the conference.

The result, "The Cluster Policies Whitebook", is now available in the pre-print version. Dr. Thomas Andersson will come with his team and present it on our 7th Annual Conference in Ottawa, Canada (see more information on www.competitiveness.org/ottawa). During the conference there will be rich opportunities to discuss the results in some of the breakout sessions that cover different areas of interest. Each participant will receive a hard copy of the Whitebook on the first day of the conference, but we recommend to read it in the beforehand. This will allow us to start with an overview of the state of the art of cluster policies.

One of the challenges in writing the Whitebook was the difficulty of capturing the consensus from a single session. In part to address this issue, this year the conference will feature tracks with three consecutive sessions on a similar topic, allowing a consensus of the Conference participants to emerge from repeated interactions.

A part from proceeding the results of the conference last year the Whitebook aims to structure the opportunities and challenges for policymaking raised by cluster developments. It provides a framework and approach to help bridge the gap between our general understanding of cluster policies and what could and should be done under specific circumstances. While focusing on the policy challenge, the Whitebook emphasizes that important contributions to clusters are made by multiple actors. Part I structures the policy issues that arise in the development of clusters, whereas Part II presents some of the rich material developed for the Gothenburg event, such as more detailed summaries of the mini forums and learning workshops that took place.

Download the Whitebook here . Please note that you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader and that the file has 3,5 MB!