Social Institutions, Regions and Actors Around Innovation Clusters

This book compares innovation “clusters” in Japan and France. The “cluster” concept, initially based on the endogenous agglomeration of business and universities as the case of “Silicon Valley,” was adopted as a model of competitiveness by practitioners — primarily state officials. In the first decade of this century, many state-led exogenous clusters were established in various countries, including Japan and France. The clusters studied empirically in this book have been the focus of public policies aimed at fostering technological activities and high-tech businesses based on academic–industry collaborations. After approximately 20 years of experimentation, the cluster phenomenon, namely, the interplay between heterogeneous actors, is re-examined, not to assess its performance but to highlight its enduring effect on specific territories in Japan and France. Rather than focusing on performance, this book highlights the influences, both negative and positive, according to the characteristics of the social contexts in Japan and France. The reader can see the effects of those clusters on human, organizational, and cognitive resources, and how their influence ultimately shapes their future territorial development.