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作者

Marco Bettiol;Maria Chiarvesio;Eleonora Di Maria;Debora Gottardello

来源

EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES,Vol.,Issue.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova, Padova, Italy;Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Udine, Udine, Italy;Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova, Padova, Italy;Faculty of Business and Economics, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

摘要

Innovation in clusters is initially rooted in proximity among specialized actors, but over time it results from an interplay between the local and global levels. The internationalization of production and the relocation of cluster manufacturing activities abroad open a debate on the impact of such dynamics upon innovation, between knowledge acquisition opportunities and the weakening of local innovation activities. This paper contributes to the debate by empirically testing whether internationalization has an impact on cluster firms’ innovation outputs. Based on a survey conducted among 259 Italian cluster firms, the results show that upstream and downstream internationalization per se does not impact innovation, measuring product, process, organizational, and marketing innovation outputs. On the contrary, collaboration with external actors, such as designers, research centres or universities, has a positive effect on firms’ innovation outputs. This is consistent with the cluster model and with previous studies focusing on innovation in the cluster context. Our analyses show that it is not internationalization that matters when it comes to innovation for cluster firms. Innovation performances are influenced by the relational capabilities of cluster firms to connect and manage collaboration even outside the cluster scale.