Regional politicians regard the cluster concept as a key factor for promoting regional economic performance. They refer to a comprehensive set of theoretical and empirical literature which provides the clusters’ positive impact on regional development. Recent studies dealing with that...

The EU Framework Programme (FP) belongs to the most important instruments promoting transnational collaborative R&D projects in Europe. Its main objective is to initiate cross-border complementarities in order to exploit knowledge resources and to conduct large scale research. Within the EU FPs...

This paper explores the impact of industrial clusters on regional growth at level of German labour market regions within a regional convergence model. It focuses on vertically connected industrial sectors, which can emerge parallel to horizontal interconnections. Based on works of Schnabl (2000)...

The paper explores the potential for inter-sectoral technology flows in industrial clusters in Germany. With the help of a product-embodied R&D flow matrix, calculated using data on input–output tables and sectoral R&D employment, we construct industrial cluster based networks of...

The city of Essen is located at the centre of the Ruhr area, one of the largest urban and industrial agglomerations in Europe. Like many places in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia Essen had to deal with tremendous structural changes due to the downturn of coal mining and the...

In recent years entrepreneurship in urban neighbourhoods, has drawn a growing attention of the research community as well as of urban planning (Mollenhorst et al. 2009). Entrepreneurship research is increasingly focussing on the manifold and intertwined contexts of entrepreneurial activities,...

Research on the spatial distribution of economic activity has mainly focussed on identifying conditions that sustain industrial clusters, as they are perceived to be the locus of regional economic growth. Taking this static perspective, today only little is known about the factors that...

The paper analyses different forms of region bound innovation and cooperation amongst small and medium sized firms of the German craft sector, mainly engaged in ?traditional? branches. The analysis is based on a recent questionnaire survey covering all trade groups of the craft sector and a...

Strong regional clusters are increasingly seen as a response to economic globalization by policy makers and regional development agencies. The reasoning of competitive advantages of countries and regions with enterprises organized in clusters has mainly been popularized by Porter (1990, 1998,...