Home » News » Publications

"Clusters, Innovation and Entrepreneurship" - OECD

The OECD, Centre for Entrepreneurship, is offering a special advance offer for the forthcoming publication "Clusters, Innovation and Entrepreneurship". Scheduled release date: June 2008

The release date of the above-mentioned publication is scheduled for June 2008. The OECD offers it for advance purchase at a special price of Euros 7 per copy, instead of the regular price of Euros 40. An opportunity to make the best use of the expertise and policy lessons contained in this book by disseminating them throughout your organisation and networks.

In order to benefit from this special offer, please contact:

Lucy Clarke
Communications Officer and Co-ordinator, Partners Club Network
OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship/OECD LEED Programme
tel. +33 1 4524 9078
fax. +33 1 4430 6267
e-mail lucy.clarke @ oecd.org

www.oecd.org/cfe/leed


About this publication

In order to boost economic development and respond efficiently to ever keener international competition, the governments of OECD Member countries need to pursue entrepreneurship and innovation policies that reflect their own distinctive characteristics. In the globalised knowledge economy, clusters have demonstrated to be an important source of innovation driven at the local level. The clusters create an environment conducive to productivity gains, which are a factor of growth, and so form a structure that can overcome the challenges of international competition. Throughout the OECD area, innovation is increasingly concentrated within clusters of enterprises and research/training institutions that work on complementary activities. This poses major challenges to policy makers as clusters require specific policies and support schemes based on an appropriate rationale with a local dimension.

Many OECD governments have put in place different policies to offer a propitious environment for cluster development as part of their strategy to create jobs and economic growth. For instance, in 2004 France introduced an industrial measure that put clusters or “pôles de compétitivité” at the heart of its policies to promote innovation and entrepreneurship at regional level. In other countries such as Canada, clusters have been supported from the central government as a mechanism to help communities build innovation and increase their capacity in key technology fields. This shows that, to be successful, national policies need to be flexible enough to allow the adaptation of the local actors to the technological and competitive changes of the global market.

This report, drafted by the OECD Programme on Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED), sets out the findings of a review conducted in 2007 with the support of the French Ministry of SMEs. The review included an in-depth study of the micro-nanotechnology cluster in Grenoble, France, and the analysis of six other internationally reputed clusters in the OECD area, namely: Vienna in Austria, Waterloo in Canada, Dunedin in New Zealand, Medicon Valley in Scandinavia, Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom, and Madison in the United States. What are the key factors for cluster success? Which is the appropriate level of intervention of the public sector for cluster development? How can public actors support the expansion of the cluster and overcome the obstacles? The report addresses these and other issues, based on the comparative analysis of the seven clusters studies. It looks at the factors that have contributed to the development of each cluster (including government policy, the role of SMEs, and the impact on local entrepreneurship), and at the challenges it faces in terms of expansion. Following that analysis, the review puts forward a set of policy recommendations that are geared to the context of clusters.