The role of cluster manager and his/her development is an essential element in order to gain a competitive advantage and to ensure sustainability of cluster organisation. Nevertheless, research on cluster management has hardly studied the scope of offered trainings with areas of developed skills for this position. Hence, the main objective of the paper is to analyze and evaluate content of current training programmes for cluster managers in Europe with respect to their focus on the development of hard and soft skills.

Cluster development programmes (CDPs) aim to support industrial clusters of agglomerated firms to achieve higher productivity and sustainable development. Such programmes have been prominent in Latin America over the past decade, but there have been few impact evaluations. This column presents the findings from an evaluation of Latin American CDPs.

Find here: https://voxeu.org/article/how-evaluate-cluster-policies

This paper seeks to contribute to the growing literature on cluster-policy evaluation in three ways: firstly, it focuses on regional cluster policies below the level of federal states in Germany to complement the majority of studies on federal and state-level programmes. Secondly, it adopts a public-choice perspective, whereas most existing research concentrates on methodological and conceptual issues associated with cluster-policy evaluation.

This handbook chapter seeks to address the evidence gap between the widespread presence of clusters and the question of whether public support of clusters is effective.

Find here: https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/16121_7.html

The central question of the paper is how can cluster-based economic policy help countries - in this case, Sweden - succeed in global competition. Three steps are taken to answer this: lessons learned from academic research; conclusions drawn from the ongoing cluster debate; implications for Sweden.

The paper compares the governance regimes of top-down and bottom-up cluster initiatives by using a classic principal-agent framework comprising task setting, assignment of decision rights, performance evaluation, and incentive system. The Bavarian Cluster Initiative, a top-down initiative, is used as a reference point and compared with the governance regimes of German and Austrian bottom-up clusters. The paper shows that differences in task setting and other elements of the principal-agent framework can lower the effectiveness of top-down clusters.