Clusters, entrepreneurial ecosystem co-creation, and appropriability: a conceptual framework

Extant literature on clusters underplays the role of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial management in creating and co-creating organizations, markets, and supporting ecosystems. We employ transaction costs, resource-knowledge-capabilities and power-control-based theories to provide a comparative static governance-based perspective on clusters. We embed this into a more general co-evolutionary entrepreneurial theory of the emergence, evolution and co-evolution of markets, ecosystems, and clusters. We suggest that clusters can involve advantages that help engender superior appropriation of co-created value, as compared to alternatives. Entrepreneurial managers, faced with a degree of choice, will help co-create clusters and be part of them, for as long as they can appropriate more value in this way than through alternatives. Copyright 2012 The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.