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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) clustering processes initiated from the bottom up. In particular, this paper seeks to tackle the major setbacks encountered by a group of Spanish SMEs with long tradition in the chemical sector on their way to setting up a cluster.

The authors propose a collaborative action research approach. The fact that the study was carried out within the framework of the EU‐FP7 CADIC project made this approach particularly suitable. The intervention strategies along the cluster development cycle are especially focused.

Collective and distributed leadership, collaborative culture, communication, dynamic relational capabilities, and a shared vision or purpose are all necessary and critical, though not sufficient elements, for the success of SME bottom‐up clusters. The timeframe of the strategic interventions and the roles of the partners are equally fundamental.

The practical implications are to enhance SMEs' clusters management capacity and collaboration readiness; to promote more business‐grounded and effective cluster policies; and to contribute to enlighten the discussions about the opportunity/appropriateness of cluster evaluation frameworks/policies addressed to enact collaboration, when the focus is the SME.

This study suggests that misalignments in the triad roles‐purpose‐culture among the cluster partners could bring about dysfunctions and lead the cluster to a prolonged “projectism” and early degeneration. Particularly, it highlights the fundamental role of the “roles” displayed in the cluster in achieving success. These roles are dynamic and emergent mechanisms of adaptation of the cluster to the internal and external environmental changes.

“We planned to enter a new market with process equipment licensed from our European parent,” said Parks Souther, President of Parkson Corporation, a subsidiary of A. Johnson & Company. We thought, given our top‐down, macroeconomic look and careful strategic planning, that our high quality would immediately garner a large market share. But to check our plan tactically, we also took a bottom‐up microeconomic look. Much to our surprise we found that all the market leaders had high quality. Position depended on having the best distributors—nearly impossible for a new entry. We also found, to our dismay that the market wasn't growing as fast as we thought it was. We saved $5 million with that bottom‐up look!”

The main purpose of this paper is to propose a model of economic development able to generate a cross‐border sustainable economic development, in regions in conflict. The Italian industrial district model implements a community industry synergy process led by the authorities according to a top‐down approach. The cluster model implements a clustering specialization process led, in the American version, by a bottom‐up approach and in the European version by a top‐down approach. The regional innovation system (RIS) provides the regional and international innovation networking required for both models in order to confront the global competition. The proposed progressive model creates the industrial specialization (industrial district) required for the development of the clustering process supported by the RIS.

The authors have selected, from the list of producers (growers and producers of olive oil), a random sample of 103 growers of olives and producers of olive oil from both groups from the Northern regions (Galilee in Israel and the Northern West Bank): 26 Palestinian growers, 25 Palestinian producers, 13 Israeli growers and 39 Israeli producers of olive oil, and interviewed them.

The results show that the community‐industry synergy of the industrial district model is supported by the economic actors from both sides of the border but refused for political reasons by the regional authorities and professional associations. The raw material (olives), the human capital and the knowledge required in order to start the clustering process exist.

The study has evaluated the Israeli‐Jewish and Arab and the Palestinian olive sector, and clearly indicates that bottom‐up decision‐making process is the only way for the moment for initiating the cluster and RIS models in the olive sector. The intervention of a third party is required in order to start the bottom‐up implementation of the industrial district model and launch the clustering process.

The main contribution of this paper lies in organizing the industrial district in such a way that it will generate a cluster in the long run. Thus, it is called progressive model.

This paper seeks to focus on industry clusters and a rationale for why they may be considered an antidote for stimulating knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation.

Community based participatory research was undertaken using case studies and interviews within four industry clusters based in two countries – Australia and Dubai. Findings were ranked according to a knowledge sharing relational framework.

Industry clusters can play a key role in growing both established and new areas of economic development. Member firm collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation can result in positive outcomes if the cluster is managed and facilitated appropriately and knowledge sharing is nurtured.

The paper examines top-down, hybrid and bottom-up clustering from a variety of sectors as a way of understanding knowledge sharing and innovation exchange. However, given this research comprised case studies, it is recommended that broader, more internationally generalizable research is conducted that includes cluster firms within a range of sectors.

The stimulation of opportunities for collaboration and innovation are mandatory for firms and regions to move forward. Irrespective of the uncertainty of the outcome, cluster managers/facilitators need to ensure that they provide regular opportunities for cluster firms facilitators/managers and representatives to network and generate new ideas.

The role of cluster managers/facilitators in supporting knowledge sharing processes has been largely overlooked to date. Agglomeration needs both visible and invisible hands to stimulate knowledge sharing and exchange.

Employing cluster analysis techniques, the paper examines the efficacy of international diversification across economic sectors, or the so‐called “bottom‐up approach,” as contrasted with the traditional approach used by fund managers of allocating assets by country and then by sector. The study covered the 1986–93 period and examined data for seven economic sectors in 20 countries divided into three regional groupings (North America, Pacific Rim, and Europe). The findings are portrayed in dendograms which depict the correlation coefficients between sector pairings. The statistical evidence suggests that the market sector approach has a great deal of merit as a basis for international portfolio diversification.

This study unpacks how organizational members construct a collective entrepreneurial identity within an organization and attempt to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's existing identity.

The study draws on the cases of two venturing units, perceived as entrepreneurial groups within their respective parent companies. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analyzed inductively and abductively.

The data revealed that organizational members co-constructed a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity to form a collective shared belief and communities of practice around what it meant to act as an entrepreneurial group within their local corporate context and how it differentiated them from others. Members also clustered around the emergent collective entrepreneurial identity through sensegiving efforts to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's identity, despite the tensions this caused.

Previous studies in corporate entrepreneurship have theorized on the top-down dynamics instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity, but have neglected the role of bottom-up dynamics. This study reveals two bottom-up dynamics that involve organizational members' agentic role in co-constructing and clustering around a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study contributes to the middle-management literature, uncovering champions' identity work in constructing a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity, with implications for followers' engagement in constructing a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study also contributes to the organizational identity literature, showing how tensions around the entrepreneurial group's distinctiveness may hinder the process of instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity.

This paper aims to examine a cluster-based strategy implemented in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia under the 2007-2013 “Regional Competitiveness and Employment” programme. Departing from traditional discretionary approaches, a substantial share of the funds was now allocated on a competitive basis. The authors analyse the resulting distribution of funds across stakeholders and sub-regions and try to assess the pros and cons of this process, which constitutes a novel delivery system for cluster policies.

Following a literature review, the paper applies two sets of regression models to explain the distribution of funds under the new policy delivery system. Interviews with stakeholders provide evidence on the efficacy and efficiency of the competitive funding process.

The changes introduced in the 2007-2013 funding period benefit universities and research organisations, as well as intermediary organisations, whereas the private sector and especially small firms capture a rather small piece of the pie. Contrary to the “innovation paradox” hypothesis, structurally weak sub-regions did not lose out in state-wide funding contests. The presence of universities with an overall high volume of third-party funding is the key variable explaining the spatial distribution of funds. This interview evidence identifies the duration of the selection process and its administrative complexity as main weaknesses, which the authors attribute to bureaucratic rationality on different levels.

This is the first analysis of a competitive funding scheme at the sub-national level, using the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia as a case study. It sheds light on the mechanisms of funding allocation in the 2007-2013 funding period of the European Union’s cohesion policy, which was reoriented towards supporting regional competitiveness and employment in response to the Lisbon Agenda. While competitive funding is still seen as mobilising regional stakeholders and improving the quality of projects and the selection process, these findings highlight administrative complexity as a main deficiency, which has partly been addressed in the 2014-2020 funding period.

This paper aims to investigate the rise of a Chinese fashion cluster in Lombardy.

Three approaches and descending levels of analysis are integrated: a quantitative analysis based on demographic data to highlight the evolution of the regional distribution of the Chinese community and Chinese entrepreneurship in Lombardy; a literature review to reconstruct the historical development of Chinatown in Milan; and few in-depth interviews and a survey to represent how the Chinese living in Chinatown perceive the changing role of the enclave.

The Chinese in Lombardy are rising as a regional ethnic fashion cluster. This cluster is rising out of three major drivers: ethnic social capital as a source of community-based entrepreneurship; the crisis of traditional industrial districts in the 1990s as a trigger opportunity; and the trans-regionalization of the fashion industry as a main driver of its current development. The rise of this cluster is bottom-up.

The findings are based on a single case study. There are evidences showing that the Chinese are rising as regional and/or inter-regional clusters in other institutional settings. However, this study may benefit from comparisons with other institutional and national contexts.

Chinese entrepreneurship may foster regional growth as a complementary source of cultural variety, internationalization and multi-regional co-specialization.

Entrepreneurship may foster social cohesion and collaboration.

This paper contributes to existing literature by proposing a would-be theory of the evolution of regional ethnic clusters.

Nowadays, the event detection is so important in gathering news from social media. Indeed, it is widely employed by journalists to generate early alerts of reported stories. In order to incorporate available data on social media into a news story, journalists must manually process, compile and verify the news content within a very short time span. Despite its utility and importance, this process is time-consuming and labor-intensive for media organizations. Because of the afore-mentioned reason and as social media provides an essential source of data used as a support for professional journalists, the purpose of this paper is to propose the citizen clustering technique which allows the community of journalists and media professionals to document news during crises.

The authors develop, in this study, an approach for natural hazard events news detection and danger citizen’ groups clustering based on three major steps. In the first stage, the authors present a pipeline of several natural language processing tasks: event trigger detection, applied to recuperate potential event triggers; named entity recognition, used for the detection and recognition of event participants related to the extracted event triggers; and, ultimately, a dependency analysis between all the extracted data. Analyzing the ambiguity and the vagueness of similarity of news plays a key role in event detection. This issue was ignored in traditional event detection techniques. To this end, in the second step of our approach, the authors apply fuzzy sets techniques on these extracted events to enhance the clustering quality and remove the vagueness of the extracted information. Then, the defined degree of citizens’ danger is injected as input to the introduced citizens clustering method in order to detect citizens’ communities with close disaster degrees.

Empirical results indicate that homogeneous and compact citizen’ clusters can be detected using the suggested event detection method. It can also be observed that event news can be analyzed efficiently using the fuzzy theory. In addition, the proposed visualization process plays a crucial role in data journalism, as it is used to analyze event news, as well as in the final presentation of detected danger citizens’ clusters.

The introduced citizens clustering method is profitable for journalists and editors to better judge the veracity of social media content, navigate the overwhelming, identify eyewitnesses and contextualize the event. The empirical analysis results illustrate the efficiency of the developed method for both real and artificial networks.

The purpose of this study is to explore the early stage of development of a cluster. The literature on early stage of cluster development shows that there are often random effects such as an entrepreneur and spin-off companies, and in this study, a coordinated approach for cluster development is described.

A single exploratory case study approach is followed. The aerospace cluster in the Spokane region, State of Washington, is described. Data from a variety of sources are triangulated to enhance the credibility of the case study findings.

It was found that although there are many types of collaborations occurring in the region, which involve policy and government organizations, the main driver of the early-stage cluster development is manufacturers-led coordinating mechanism. Individual manufacturers are too small to be successful in the aerospace industry, and they are collaborating to present a united “front” to out-of-the-region customers. Once customers place an order, then within this coordinating mechanism, the work is divided among different manufacturers.

The research has two main limitations. First, it is a single case study, and therefore, the results may not be generalizable. Second, the cluster is in an early stage of development, so it is not (yet) clear whether this manufacturers-led coordinated approach will have long-term success.

The studies offer potential for cluster development that go beyond relying on a single entrepreneur or on mostly government- or policy-driven initiatives. Instead, this is an approach that can be used by industry to lift the overall competitiveness of their region.

This cluster development approach offers potential for economic development of smaller regions which mainly consist of small- and medium-sized companies without endowment benefits or a large local customer base.

This study adds to the existing knowledge on clusters and cluster types. The identified cluster approach does not fit with the main types of clusters that have been identified in the literature. The companies involved are mainly small- to medium-sized companies, but by coordinating their capabilities, they are able to present core capabilities in a much more attractive manner to customers. This cluster development approach is not driven by or achieved through advantages in innovation, vertical or horizontal supply chain competition and advantages, creation of spin-off firms, or a regional demand base as customers are located outside the region. It deviates in terms of the types of companies involved and, mostly, in a sense that it acts as one unit to customers who are located outside the region.