![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s German technology policy has experienced a paradigmatic shift from standard grant schemes towards a region-oriented and competition-based R&D policy. Currently, a new policy experiment, the InterClust contest, is under way, trying to simultaneously foster place-based innovation, R&D internationalization and the internationalization of innovative places. The current paper analyses the new policy, relating it to the recent literatures on heterogeneous firms and on cluster-life cycles, and presents results from a firm survey performed in 21 winner regions of InterClust. Findings show that the new funding scheme takes insights from recent theoretical developments into account and addresses important impediments to firm and cluster internationalization. Although it is too early for an overall assessment, it is argued that the long-term impact will critically depend on the inflow of heterogeneous knowledge and the strength of intra-regional mobilization effects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 For the sake of readability, in the following only the word ‘clusters’ will be used instead of referring to both ‘clusters and networks’.
2 Well known examples within Germany include the BioProfile contest and the InnoRegio contest as well as the Leading-Edge Cluster Competition launched in 2007. Examples outside Germany include the French policy of Competitive Clusters or the French Local Productivity System (LPS) cluster programme.
3 We focus our analysis on the first two competition rounds, since data on the third round is not yet available.
4 International partners need to bring in their own project funding.
5 The following paragraphs make use of the available information on the BMBF homepage. For more details, see: https://www.bmbf.de/en/internationalisation-of-leading-edge-clusters-forward-looking-projects-and-comparable-1416.html.
6 The number of targeted countries per cluster ranges from one to five, with the average being 2.3.
7 In total, there are 22 winner regions in the first two competition rounds. All of them were contacted but the survey in one winner region of the second round yielded no sufficient response, such that it had to be excluded from the sample.
8 The different firm-size categories are defined according to the European Commission Recommendation of 6 May 2003. For comparison, see: http://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environment/sme-definition_de.
9 Nonetheless, those respondents gave useful answers for other questions, which is why they are kept in the sample.
10 The group of firms in the lowest age quartile comprises 91 firms, whereas the group of older firms consists of 273 firms.
11 It should be noted that although there is a large difference with respect to FDI in the displayed numbers, the high number for young firms results from a very low number of overall young firms that are engaged in FDI. Differences between these groups for imports, FDI and human capital development are all insignificant.
12 It should not come as a surprise that the current measures are less well known than the overall internationalization strategy, since it was only recently that the clusters have established a strategy for InterClust, whereas the cluster’s internationalization strategy has been in place for a longer period of time in many cases.
13 Note that only those answers will be presented which have been mentioned by more than 10% of all firms.
14 Which selection process is chosen can vary with clusters’ prior experience with international partners. This, in turn, depends on the stage of development of the respective cluster. Those in earlier development stages still have a stronger focus on internal learning processes and on establishing regional connections (see Section 3.1). In more mature clusters the focus can shift more easily towards international partners. Since median cluster age ranges from 4 to 66 years and median firm age in those clusters ranges from 9 to 74.5 years, it seems like clusters in InterClust are quite heterogeneous in terms of their maturity. A recent study by Elola, Valdaliso, Franco, & López, Citation2017 analyzing cluster policies for the Basque country suggests that not taking into account the different development phase of the clusters might reduce the overall effectiveness of the policies.
15 Source: Communication with BMBF Projektträger Jülich (PtJ).
16 This figure is only available on the German website version. See: https://www.bmbf.de/de/cluster-netzwerke-international-547.html.