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This chapter aims to enrich knowledge about cluster initiatives acting as intermediaries primarily between members in a cluster or in regional context. This is a practically oriented manuscript written to contribute to refinement of existing policies by proposing recommendations based on recent empirical studies regarding funding, actors’ and activities’ content, as well as cluster initiatives’ assessment. It is proposed that public support should be balanced, targeting new as well as established, well-functioning cluster initiatives. Furthermore, regional authorities should encourage multifaceted collaboration (e.g., Triple Helix), stimulate variation in activities to maximize the benefit of cluster initiatives as well as define and communicate success factors that make it possible to evaluate cluster initiatives from a holistic perspective. These recommendations are primary aimed for regional authorities and reflect a bottom-up perspective where both logic of initiatives’ actions and their development are captured. Yet, even national authorities can make use of the recommendations in this chapter to improve governance of cluster initiatives and to determine further directions of regional policies.

This chapter elucidates how digital citizenship regimes may be rescaling nation-states. In order to shed light on this phenomenon, the chapter introduces and answers three main research questions to unfold the content of this book as follows: (1) How will nation-states in Europe evolve in the aftermath of the emerging digital citizenship regimes? (2) Against the backdrop of the COVID-19, will the urban age reconfigure the technopolitics of European nation-states through new digital citizenship regimes (Moisio, 2018)? (3) And ultimately, will Europe evolve towards a post-national technopolity from a platform of established nation-states headed for a city-regionalised federal network of nations determined voluntarily and democratically through blockchain (Bauböck & Orgad, 2019; Calzada, 2018a, 2022; Calzada & Bustard, 2022; De Filippi & Lavayssiére, 2020; De Filippi, Mann, & Reijers, 2020; Keating, 2017; Keating, Jordana, Marx, & Wouters, 2019; Orgad & Bauböck, 2018)?

Enterprise education has been regularly cited as a tool which can be utilised to not only increase the level of entrepreneurship within an economy, but also the success of those enterprises created. This chapter explores the extent to which participation in enterprise education is associated with the adoption of new technology within new businesses since this is one way that businesses can remain competitive, not only within their own countries, but when competing internationally. Using data from the UK Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey, the study finds evidence that those firms undertaking enterprise education in the form of university-based schemes or government sponsored training programmes are more likely to be using newer technology. However, this relationship is relatively weak, and brings into question whether many enterprise courses offer effective value for money.

The aim of the chapter is to identify the internationalization models of SME industrial district firms within a very integrated and dynamic Regional Innovation System (RIS) of Italy. By doing so, we investigate which are the strategies of firms embedded in a RIS to access global suppliers and markets. Accordingly, this chapter explores the role of SMEs firms' dynamic capabilities, its linkage with the industry investments in ICT (information and communication technologies) and the impact of the utilization of regional knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) in shaping the degree of internationalization of local firms.

The analysis is based on a survey addressed during 2004 to entrepreneurs or managers of a sample of 125 SMEs firms operating in 7 industrial districts (biomedical, ceramics, shipbuilding, footwear, textile, plastics and packaging) of the Emilia Romagna.

The results coming from a structural equation model revealed factors that impact on firms' degree of internationalization in the input (relocalization of foreign purchases through global value chains) and in the output dimension (export sales). Some interesting insights on what lies beneath the internationalization of firms in a very dynamic regional innovation system like that one of Emilia Romagna are provided.