With its Leading-Edge Cluster Competition (in German: Spitzencluster-Wettbewerb; LECC), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) is supporting innovation clusters in a nationwide contest for the first time. In three waves, 15 cluster initiatives were selected and provided with funds to support them on their way to becoming international leaders in their field of technology. This paper presents the results of empirical studies regarding several important aspects of the LECC. The analysis of network relations shows that the LECC's short-term goal of intensifying or enhancing networking between innovative stakeholders in the cluster regions has been achieved. At the same time, certain types of regional impulses of the LECC can already be observed, primarily an improved visibility of the Leading-Edge Cluster regions and enhanced regional R&D activity. When looking at causal programme effects, we find that the programme increases firm-level R&D expenditure, but also that the programme design influences the programme impulse, e.g. by promoting additional activities of SMEs.
Based on empirical findings on the effects of cluster policies in Germany, this paper scrutinises the available knowledge on cluster policies impact. There is a growing body of insights on direct effects of policy measures on cluster actors, cluster organisations and innovation networks of the promoted clusters. For some industries such as biotechnology, there are indications that cluster policies had a substantial influence on the formation of new firms and emerging sectoral structures. While the available information seems to support the hypothesis that cluster policies can provide positive impulses for the development of clusters, the actual knowledge on far-reaching impacts of cluster policies on economic structures and processes is still rather limited. The paper asks for the reasons of this knowledge gap between expectations placed in cluster policies and the available evidence on their impact. We identify five reasons: (i) problems in addressing the systemic nature of cluster policy interventions and their effects, (ii) deficiencies regarding the methodologies used, (iii) a lacking informational basis, (iv) practical contexts (e.g., a lack of interest of policy makers) leading to deficiencies in incentive mechanisms and (v) the limited transferability of evaluation results to other cluster policy contexts. For future evaluations, we propose among others the use of system-related approaches to impact analyses based on mixed-method designs as well as comparative case studies based on new methods like process tracing. In order to improve the incentives for evaluators, an increasing awareness of policy makers about the relevance of evaluation studies would be important.
When Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial was released in West Germany in 1963, many critics were preoccupied with the changes Welles had made to the original work, a response that was perhaps unsurprising given the assumption that film adaptations are meant to abide by the literary work. The key issue here, however, is the meaning of fidelity. What makes specific texts meaningful within a particular culture, so that issues of "textual fidelity" become significant? 1 After the end of World War Two and the Third Reich, during which time Kafka's works had been banned in Germany, those same works re-entered the Federal Republic (they continued to be banned in East Germany) essentially altered in their original meanings. They had become symbolic of what is still known as "the Kafkaesque", an atmosphere of "Angst", resignation and powerlessness linked with the anxieties of postwar life. Promoted primarily through the editorial efforts of Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who encouraged a reading of Kafka's works as allegories with a universal philosophical dispensation and an understanding of their author as a type of spiritual figure outside all historical and literary context, 2 the "Kafkaesque" would nonetheless find itself circulating in very real historical and national contexts where the idea of 'postwar anxiety' meant different things to different people, including fear of nuclear annihilation, communist takeover, and in the case of West Germany, fear and unease over the legacy of the Third Reich, its effects on German society, and its international standing as a nation. 2 By the early 1960s West Germany had integrated into a Cold War alliance with the United States, which tended to encourage a focus upon the immediate threat of communism and to discourage either an open confrontation or a working through of the "Josef K von 1963...": Orson Welles' 'Americanized' Version of The Trial and ...
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