How Social Capital, Trust And Cluster Management Affect Firms' Innovation Performance Within Clusters

Innovation within clusters is a significant aspect in regional development. The role of socialcapital and absorptive capacity in leveraging both exploratory and exploitive innovationhas widely been emphasized in economic geography and regional studies. Social interaction,in fact, affects the opportunity to identify and select new knowledge sources, while absorptivecapacity is crucial to create firms' dynamic capabilities and positively impact on innovationprocess. However, whether cluster management and trust can facilitate and better coordinatesocial interactions between its members or between members and external actors, enough toincrease innovation capacity of firms within cluster, has not been adequately investigated yet.The paper provides some interesting evidences on importance of absorptive capacity, formaland informal social interaction mechanisms to support exploratory and exploitative innovationprocesses, based on the analysis of a sample of firms belonging to twelve cluster of sixEuropean countries. Our findings show that local trustful relationships effect on exploitativemore than explorative innovation development. Differently, cluster management contributesonly marginally to the innovation capacities of firms within cluster and its contribution is specificof some clusters' contextual conditions.