Welcome to the InfoSci Platform
Do Top-Down Cluster Policies Succeed in Fostering Social Capital and Innovation?: Some Insights from Italian Cases

Do Top-Down Cluster Policies Succeed in Fostering Social Capital and Innovation?: Some Insights from Italian Cases

Silvia Massa, Stefania Testa
Copyright: © 2010 |Pages: 21
ISBN13: 9781615208753|ISBN10: 1615208755|EISBN13: 9781615208760
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-875-3.ch014
Cite Chapter Cite Chapter

MLA

Massa, Silvia, and Stefania Testa. "Do Top-Down Cluster Policies Succeed in Fostering Social Capital and Innovation?: Some Insights from Italian Cases." Intellectual Capital and Technological Innovation: Knowledge-Based Theory and Practice, edited by Pedro López Sáez, et al., IGI Global, 2010, pp. 297-317. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-875-3.ch014

APA

Massa, S. & Testa, S. (2010). Do Top-Down Cluster Policies Succeed in Fostering Social Capital and Innovation?: Some Insights from Italian Cases. In P. López Sáez, G. Castro, J. Navas López, & M. Delgado Verde (Eds.), Intellectual Capital and Technological Innovation: Knowledge-Based Theory and Practice (pp. 297-317). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-875-3.ch014

Chicago

Massa, Silvia, and Stefania Testa. "Do Top-Down Cluster Policies Succeed in Fostering Social Capital and Innovation?: Some Insights from Italian Cases." In Intellectual Capital and Technological Innovation: Knowledge-Based Theory and Practice, edited by Pedro López Sáez, et al., 297-317. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2010. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-875-3.ch014

Export Reference

Mendeley
Favorite

Abstract

In the last decades, the cluster approach to innovation has become very influential among policymakers. Clusters are recognized as the primary locus of social capital (SC) and civic engagement and are thus able to foster company innovativeness. This chapter investigates the effectiveness of top-down cluster policies in creating new SC and the ability of this SC to create new intellectual capital (IC), hence improving firms’ innovativeness. For this purpose, two case studies about top-down clusters in Italy were developed. While in literature the SC-IC-innovation link has been largely investigated as well as the power of traditional clusters to promote SC, to the knowledge of the authors, the same power has not been investigated with reference to top-down clusters. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate such links, thus contributing to fill a gap in the extant literature. Examination of the cases in this study revealed almost opposite results in terms of the links investigated.

Request Access

You do not own this content. Please login to recommend this title to your institution's librarian or purchase it from the IGI Global bookstore.