Industrial clusters in Silicon Valley, in Hsinchu Park, in Northern Italy, and around Cambridge, U.K. have captured the imagination of policymakers, researchers, city planners and business people. Where clusters take root, they can generate valuable spillovers, promote innovation, and create the critical industrial mass for sustained growth. For cities faced with the hallowing out of their industrial sectors and economic decline such as Kitakyushu in Japan, creating a cluster which would reverse the trends, is enormously attractive.By synthesizing the essential conditions and policies responsible for the dynamism and resilience of successful clusters, this volume delineates both the conditions which contributed to past successes, and also how the reading of this experience is being used to seed new clusters in Singapore, Bangalore and Seoul. The volume sheds fresh light on the promise of clusters, the challenges facing policymakers and the track record to date of progress with promising new starts.
