ABSTRACT
This chapter details the centrality of anchor entrepreneurs who preceded cluster inter-firm relationships, trade associations, external scale economies and agglomeration effects extends a theme of an earlier paper on industrial districts. It explains that noise generated by small businesses; trade unions and local institutions led many to ignore how leading firms orchestrated most industrial districts and the networks comprising them. The chapter concerns the frequent claim that clusters are rife with firm cooperation and associations, only Marco Caprai invested resources in orchestrating other cluster firms to build local institutions. The intensive focus on using highly advanced capital and research-intensive technologies dependent on complex organizational structures and relationships to create new industries ignores the reality that much new and innovative industry is poorly correlated with scientific inventions and large institutional projects. The chapter shows that historic accidents developing into mature industries merit more scholarly attention by tracing a cluster's evolution change over time.
