ABSTRACT
Understanding the mechanisms behind the emergence of industrial clusters is of great interest because it may help the emergence of new such clusters. In many countries and regions the political systems and associated actors are seeking best practice in order to copy the success of other, established industrial clusters. This has also been the case in North Jutland, Denmark, where a well-established cluster of wireless telecommunications, NorCOM, was – at least to some extent – the motivation for a cluster initiative in biomedical technology, Biomedico, in the same region. The NorCOM cluster was originally initiated by local companies. It was an industry-driven bottom-up process that can be tracked back to the 1960s, but later it developed further through university-industry interaction. The story of NorCOM illustrates the phenomenon of a high-tech cluster being able to emerge in a peripheral region.1 At present the North Jutland region, with its approximately 500,000 inhabitants, still has a fairly large share of low-tech industries, such as primary industries, agriculture, food processing, fishery and building materials. The Biomedico initiative was started around 2000 by policy actors, encouraged by and basing their efforts on the world-leading results of the Department of Health Science and Technology of the regional university in North Jutland. It is a top-down initiative in the search for new industries that could supplement the existing NorCOM cluster in order to achieve a more diversified industrial structure. This search gained further momentum when the telecom sector experienced the general downturn of the ICT industries in 2000-2001.
