The paper is concerned with spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in various sorts of interactive learning processes. It questions the merit of the prevailing explanatory model where the realm of tacit knowledge transfer is confined to local milieus whereas codified knowledge may roam the globe almost frictionless. When doing so the paper highlights the conditions under which both tacit and codified knowledge can be exchanged locally and globally. A distinction is made between, on the one hand, the learning processes taking place among actors embedded in a community by just being there - dubbed buzz - and, on the other, the knowledge attained by investing in building channels of communication - called pipelines - to selected providers located outside the local milieu. It is argued, that the co-existence of high levels of buzz and many pipelines may provide firms located in outward looking and lively clusters with a string of particular advantages not available to outsiders. Finally, some prescriptive elements, stemming from the argument, are identified.
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Paper provided by DRUID, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy/Aalborg University, Department of Business Studies in its series DRUID Working Papers with number
02-12.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure R10 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General
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