Abstract. Since the accession of the Visegrad Group of countries (V4) to the European Union, the importance of clusters has increased. With growing global competitiveness and EU 12 trends, a gradual awareness of creative industries is observed in V4 countries. Therefore, this article analyses creative clusters and factors conditioning their establishment and development. On the basis of a literature review and a questionnaire survey, a mapping of creative clusters was conducted. In addition, catalysts, main motives and key factors in the process of their establishment were identified, as were the activities and factors hampering their development. The scheme of cluster development is presented as the outcome of the qualitative analysis, along with a comparison to findings of other studies. Research findings show that trust building and administrative obstacles are among the main barriers, especially for design clusters and cultural clusters.
Collaborative places nurture creativity and efficiency of cultural and creative industries. Research in collaborative places revealed they are essential for networking and cooperation in the creative ecosystem. The results of studies focusing on competitiveness of coworking spaces and their effect on boosting entrepreneurship are rather vague. Furthermore, an awareness of how coworking spaces stimulate coworkers to engage in urban regeneration through local community initiatives is limited. Hence, this study seeks to provide an insight into coworking spaces from the organizational perspective devoted to entrepreneurship and competitiveness. Simultaneously, the paper aims to reveal synergies between creative communities and local development. The method of data gathering consists of semi-structured in-depth interviews with managers and entrepreneurs from selected countries of the EU applying the grounded theory for their analysis. The results suggest that coworking spaces indicate a boosting of the entrepreneurship of the creative class through collective projects. These activities tend to stimulate knowledge creation and open innovation in the creative ecosystem that benefit local development. Coworking spaces also represent a driving force to initiate and maintain a dialogue between the creative ecosystem and local authorities for culture-led urban development.
Sharing of spaces enhances networking and collaboration in cultural and creative industries on both formal and informal levels. Nevertheless, there is a lack of awareness concerning coworking spaces (CWS) and their resilience through knowledge sharing in communities, especially in space-community-coworker interactions. The aim is to identify how CWS enhance their resilience through knowledge sharing in communities and develop collective learning in local creative ecosystems to promote adaptation. A total of 34 in-depth face-to-face interviews with CWSs founders or managers and seventeen creative entrepreneurs in selected CWS in Europe. Using content analysis by axial and selective coding of the collected primary data, groups of codes were eventually integrated to interpret the issue by its contextualization using grounded theory as a research approach in such qualitative study. Results suggest that CWS strengthen their resilience through cross-over innovation with diverse stakeholder engagement and spillover effects of knowledge sharing as a part of space resilience. These initiatives contribute to community resilience with a focus on entrepreneurial thinking and career development. CWS develop interactive learning models as initiatives to retain and attract creative entrepreneurs in communities. The paper concludes that CWS can develop a creative ecosystem with systematic collective learning engaging different stakeholders.
Despite the fact that extensive research devoted to cultural and creative industries spatial clustering has been conducted, studies dealing with institutionalised clusters as official entities are rare. Thus creative clusters organisations are weakly theorized compared to industrial clusters due to their project-oriented (non-standardized) production. Consequently, the aim of the paper is to gain insight in benefits of institutionalised cultural and creative clusters and determinants as well as barriers of their development based on cluster managers’ activities in the Visegrád countries. To achieve the stated aim semi-structured interviews with cluster managers were conducted for data collection. Subsequently grounded theory approach and network maps were employed to draw results. Hence, the key benefits for cluster members are reflected in utilizing access to cluster internationalisation activities, knowledge sharing within local creative milieu, and collaborative projects to increase their competitiveness as well as commercialisation of their products. Furthermore, knowledge of cooperation, level of openness, approach to life-long learning, amount of time for cluster activities, previous experience, communication skills, and involvement in mutual cooperation were identified as predominant determinants of cultural and creative cluster development.
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