From Clusters to Platform Policies in Regional Development

Abstract

This short briefing paper addresses the next stage in the evolution of regional development policy. It is clear that the cluster idea has held sway in this field for some 20 years. By now, practitioners and academics are widely sceptical of policy capabilities to create let alone build clusters. Recessionary times make this more difficult. Moreover, where some recent success can be seen, it is associated with command economies such as China where normal market and democratic barriers to large public investments in such measures are absent. Nevertheless, clusters exist in many places and there is evidence, displayed in this paper, that in some regions they have mutated into multi-cluster platforms. Now, as regions seek to rebalance, platform policies are evolving and being implemented. This paper shows how this is in part a response to “Grand Challenges” and the emergence of “challenge-driven” innovation.

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally prepared for the Danish Enterprise Agency EBST (www.regionalt.dk). I am grateful to Katrine Larsen of EBST for permitting me to reproduce it for a wider academic and policy audience. I am also grateful to Henrik Halkier, a colleague at Aalborg, and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

Related variety may be defined in terms of membership of two-digit national industry statistical categories, such as “chemicals” and, in more modern classifications, “life sciences” (Boschma, 2005). However, from an evolutionary perspective, which is necessary to explain clusters and platforms, the “relatedness” may be visible only after the fact. An example today is the close interaction between agro-food and automotive research and business activity around biofuels. These interactions show their “relatedness” unpredictably and only ex post. See Cooke (2012a).