TY - JOUR

T1 - Entrepreneurship

T2 - The role of clusters theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence from Germany

AU - Rocha, Hector O.

AU - Sternberg, Rolf

N1 - Funding Information: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1st Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Conference, Berlin 1–3 April 2004. We thank Edward Malecki, Sander Wennekers, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We also thank the German experts for their valuable time in answering the questionnaire, Ingo Lückgen for his effective assistantship in managing the questionnaire process and Timo Lit-zenberger, who provided valuable support in terms of secondary data on German industries. The first author gratefully acknowledges the funding received from ACES (Argentina) and the Society for the Advancement of Management. London Business School funded the questionnaire sent to 162 German experts. The second author would like to express his gratitude to the KfW Bankengruppe and Ernst&Young Germany, which provided financial support for the data collection (GEM Germany) underlying this paper. Copyright: Copyright 2011 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2005/4

Y1 - 2005/4

N2 - This paper is about the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. Defining entrepreneurship as the creation of new organisations and clusters as a geographically proximate group of interconnected firms and associated institutions in related industries, this paper aims to answer three research questions : first, do clusters matter to entrepreneurship at the regional level? Second, if clusters are associated with different levels of entrepreneurship, what explains those differences? Third, what do the answers to the previous questions imply for academics and policy makers? To answer these questions, this paper distinguishes between clusters and industrial agglomerations and advances a theoretical model and empirical research to explain the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. This paper uses the 97 German planning regions as units of analysis to test the hypotheses. Using hypotheses testing and OLS fixed-effects model, this paper finds that clusters do have an impact on entrepreneurship at the regional level, but industrial agglomerations do not. Implications for academics and policy makers and suggestions for future research are given in the concluding section.

AB - This paper is about the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. Defining entrepreneurship as the creation of new organisations and clusters as a geographically proximate group of interconnected firms and associated institutions in related industries, this paper aims to answer three research questions : first, do clusters matter to entrepreneurship at the regional level? Second, if clusters are associated with different levels of entrepreneurship, what explains those differences? Third, what do the answers to the previous questions imply for academics and policy makers? To answer these questions, this paper distinguishes between clusters and industrial agglomerations and advances a theoretical model and empirical research to explain the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. This paper uses the 97 German planning regions as units of analysis to test the hypotheses. Using hypotheses testing and OLS fixed-effects model, this paper finds that clusters do have an impact on entrepreneurship at the regional level, but industrial agglomerations do not. Implications for academics and policy makers and suggestions for future research are given in the concluding section.

KW - Clusters

KW - Entrepreneurship

KW - Germany

KW - Industrial agglomerations

KW - Neoclassical economics

KW - Socioeconomics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=17444395984&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s11187-005-1993-9

DO - 10.1007/s11187-005-1993-9

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:17444395984

VL - 24

SP - 267

EP - 292

JO - Small business economics

JF - Small business economics

SN - 0921-898X

IS - 3

ER -