Flanders Language Valley; Industrial Districts and Localized Technological Change

This case study questions how Flanders Language Valley developed as a cluster of localized technological change. Through licensing the attracted small, mostly foreign firms use the research lab of L&H Speech Products as a common source of codified knowledge and with their fast entrepreneurial reaction they complement it by developing a broad range of applications. Subsequently, the created favorable communication conditions induced innovative linkages between the attracted SMEs. Like the Silicon Valley role-model, a strong pilot firm, venture capital, education and most of all the informal networking were critical to the development of FLV. Companies ''find'' each other at FLV to their mutual advantage. They learn from each other and benefit from developing and using common pools of resources in proximity, e.g., companies find employees in the ''collective pool of labour'' created by several education and training programmes.