Developing Photonics Clusters : Commonalities, Contrasts and Contradictions

Regional agglomerations or clusters of specialised firms and other organisations, in particular industries, have beenaround for centuries and have been a subject of research for decades (for an overview see Porter 1998a: 206-208;Enright 1998, 2003). Obviously, this is true for traditional industries such as apparel (Sabel et al. 1989; Powell 1990;Lazerson 1995), shoes (Becattini 2002), coal and steel (Grabher 1993), watch-making (Glasmeier 1994) andmachine-building (Heidenreich and Krauss 1998). But even younger and still emerging high-tech clusters have alreadybeen intensively studied (e.g. Saxenian 1994 on ICT in Silicon Valley; Powell et al. 2002, Cooke 2004 and Di Tommasoet al. 2006 on biotechnology and life sciences; Braunerhjelm et al. 2000 on polymers; Martinez-Fernandez andLeevers 2004 on nanotechnology). Nevertheless, it is still quite unclear how clusters, in particular innovative high-techclusters, develop – and are developed...