Localized creativity, small high-tech entrepreneurship, related innovation platforms, social capital embedded in dynamically open territorial communities and context-specific though continuously upgrading policy platforms are all means to face new challenges and to promote increased absorptive...

One of the most basic conditions required for drawing lessons from regional benchmarking is to compare homogeneous regions and learn from equivalents. This condition is not met when regions for comparison are chosen based on their high performance, overlooking their regional context or...

Although clusters life cycles tend to co-evolve with the life cycle of its dominant industry (Bergman, 2008; Menzel and Fornahl, 2010), the stylized life cycle model does not capture the full complexity of cluster evolution (Martin and Sunley, 2011). Empirical studies indicate that clusters do not...

Benchmarking analysis facilitates the formulation of competitiveness and innovation strategies. It also helps in the monitoring and assessment of the initiatives that have taken place. The aim of this work is to provide an instrument to facilitate the development of the three stages that...