ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the evaluation of the South-East Brabant cluster scheme. This scheme, which ran from 1994 through 2005, supported new product development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the above region, also known as the Eindhoven region. In early 2005 a group of Master’s students from Tilburg University, under the supervision two staff members from the Department of Organization Studies, carried out an evaluation of the scheme. Of the 102 clusters, 25 were involved in the evaluation. The chapter begins with a sketch of the Eindhoven region and of the cluster scheme, its objectives and origin. It then discusses the framework that was used to evaluate the scheme. Next the results of the evaluation are presented in three subsections: the outcomes of the product development effort in the various clusters, the process of product development within the clusters, and the conditions under which this process took place. Conclusions regarding the effectiveness of the cluster scheme are presented in the final section.
