ABSTRACT
Clusters have been a prominent topic in regional development research for the past two decades. They are defined as geographically concentrated and interconnected firms and institutions in a specific field (Porter 2008). Studies have investigated cluster competitiveness, networks of innovation and knowledge relations (Braunerhelm and Feldman 2006, Karlsson 2008, Asheim et al. 2011, Tödtling et al. 2013). More recently their long-term development has been explored with life cycle and evolutionary models (Bergman 2008, Belussi and Sedita 2009, Menzel and Fornahl 2010). However, knowledge gaps remain as to driving forces and factors for cluster change and the relevance of different spatial scales. Dominant approaches have stressed supply and demand, related industries and networks, among others. Such factors tended to be analysed from a static perspective, and the geographical focus was placed on the respective locality or region, or on an overly schematic local–global perspective (Bathelt et al. 2004). We suggest that driving factors of cluster evolution are the result of interdependencies at several spatial scales, and that these patterns change over time from early to later stages of cluster evolution (Martin and Sunley 2006, Bergman 2008, Menzel and Fornahl 2010) depending on the industry and knowledge base (Asheim et al. 2011). Based on cluster life cycle and evolutionary theories, we investigate to what extent factors for cluster evolution change in their importance over time, and how they shift between geographical scales throughout cluster evolution. By ‘scales’ we refer to geographical levels such as regional, national, European and global representing different institutional contexts. This chapter investigates and compares the environmental technology cluster of Upper Austria (ET) to the new media cluster of Vienna (NM) in this regard. The cases were selected because of their different knowledge bases (predominantly synthetic and symbolic knowledge bases, respectively) and regional settings.
