Market and hierarchical/organizational failures have long been the target of public policies explicitly aimed to mitigate their negative effects. However, in spite of a growing interest in policies around industrial clusters and business networks, scholarship on public efforts at remediating network failures has been ad hoc and lacking a binding theory. A central question is what strategies public agencies employ to repair network failures. We begin to answer this question by distinguishing between two distinct approaches: (1) “network construction” in which government agents actively build, re-shape, or thicken the structures of private sector networks; and (2) “network activation” in which government agents seek to alter the internal dynamics of existing private sector networks. To provide empirical support for these concepts, we provide a series of short international examples to illustrate the scope of network remediation activities as well as two in-depth cases that demonstrate how these mechanisms can work: the Canadian Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) and the specialized Mexican Lead Substitution Program.

中文翻译：

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修补网络：修复网络故障的公共策略

长期以来，市场和等级/组织失灵一直是明确旨在减轻其负面影响的公共政策的目标。然而，尽管人们对围绕产业集群和商业网络的政策越来越感兴趣，但关于修复网络故障的公共努力的学术研究一直是临时性的，缺乏具有约束力的理论。一个核心问题是公共机构采用什么策略来修复网络故障。我们开始通过区分两种不同的方法来回答这个问题：（1）“网络建设”，政府机构积极构建、重塑或加强私营部门网络的结构；(2) “网络激活”，政府机构试图改变现有私营部门网络的内部动态。为了为这些概念提供经验支持，