ABSTRACT

Regional clusters have become an inseparable component of modern economies. Spurred by the idea that clusters unrestrictedly encourage firm innovativeness, the cluster approach has particularly gained attention among politicians. Nevertheless, due to a lack of holistic consideration of different influencing variables, the scientific results about the effect of clusters on firm innovative performance are highly contradictive. Consequently, this paper aims to empirically investigate the conditions through which companies can gain from being located in clusters, focussing thereby particularly on moderating variables that relate to possible knowledge spillovers. Therefore, three different levels of analysis are considered separately and interactively. By analysing a unique multilevel dataset of 11.889 companies in Germany evidence is found that being located in a cluster has a positive impact on firm innovativeness. However, the results also indicate that firms benefit unequally within the cluster environment, depending on the specific firm, cluster and market/industry conditions.

摘要

区域集群已成为现代经济不可分割的组成部分。在集群无限制地鼓励企业创新的想法的推动下，集群方法特别受到政治家的关注。然而，由于缺乏对不同影响变量的整体考虑，关于集群对企业创新绩效影响的科学结果是高度矛盾的。因此，本文旨在实证研究公司可以从位于集群中获得的条件，从而特别关注与可能的知识溢出相关的调节变量。因此，三个不同层次的分析被分别和交互地考虑。通过分析 11 个独特的多级数据集。德国 889 家公司的证据表明，位于集群中对企业创新有积极影响。然而，结果还表明，企业在集群环境中的收益不平等，这取决于具体的企业、集群和市场/行业条件。