What Exactly Are Clusters?

In this chapter, we look at the theoretical concept of clusters. We trace the concept through history starting with Marshall, who laid the foundations for it with his “industrial districts” analysis in the late nineteenth century. We then look at how the concept was revived in the 1970s and 1980s of the last century by the Italian researcher Giacomo Becattini on the move from industrial “sectors” to industrial “districts” as a locus for inter-firm collaboration in Italy in 1979, by the French GREMI group, and later, (in the early globalisation debate of the 1990s) by the American economists Krugman and Porter. This section gives some background to the concept of clusters in the literature, and the particular focus of different theories. This provides some context for the focus of the study in the operating landscape for stakeholders on the ground, rather than at the level of macro-economic conditions that are the traditional focus of the literature on cluster competitiveness.