ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the learning mechanisms in clusters and illuminates the learning mechanisms in a networked business incubator. It explains the methodology and presents the results of empirical analysis. The network is strongly centered on the incubator, which offers comprehensive support to new ventures and has been involved in different types of relationships. Scillitoe and Chakrabarti suggest that 'research focusing on the incubation process of individual ventures, particularly the social aspects associated with incubation, holds the greatest research potential for understanding the incubation process'. The life cycle theory suggests that some socio-economic mechanisms work as triggering factors that intervene in the local system's genesis and in its evolution-exhaustion, which refers to the factors explaining the decline of clusters. Clusters can be seen as networks of inter-organizational relationships, and precisely of relationships between people working for different, interconnected organizations who interact as part of their roles in their respective organizations.
