Abstract:The business environment in transition countries is often extraordinarily challenging for companies. The transition process these countries find themselves in leads to constant changes in the institutional environment. Hence, institutional voids prevail. These institutional voids cause competitive disadvantages for small and medium enterprises. Cluster policy can address these competitive disadvantages. As cluster policy generally aims at supporting companies' competitive advantage by spurring innovation and productivity, it can help to bridge institutional voids. This article's research question aims at analyzing and comparing cluster policies in the institutional context of two transition countries (Serbia and Tunisia) and analyzes to what extent cluster policies in these two countries are adapted to institutional voids prevailing there. The case studies offer insights into apparent difficulties of clusters in bridging formal institutional voids, as well as, notably, into the informal void of skill mismatches in the labor market. Still, for some specific voids, clusters do at least implicitly assume a bridging role. While the cluster policies examined do not explicitly target the institutional voids identified, cluster management can-in the course of time-align its service offering more closely with these voids. Bottom-up designed cluster policies can play an especially important role in such an evolution towards bridging institutional voids. OPEN ACCESSAdm. Sci. 2015, 5 189
Abstract:In recent decades, numerous cluster associations with public and/or private support have been established to facilitate clusters. These cluster associations have launched a number of activities and services aiming to increase the competitiveness, innovation, and productivity of their members and beyond. At the same time, it appears that many of these associations apply similar activity bundles to reach their objectives. However, the institutional context differs between clusters and their countries. This paper questions how these activity bundles are influenced by different sets of institutional conditions and proposes a framework for the explorative analysis of cluster activity bundles in specific institutional environments. Moreover, using the framework, a detailed review of cluster associations and their activities in different information and communication technologies (ICT) clusters is presented, the development of which is central to regional advanced industrial transformation in the context of regional smart specialization and the Industrial Renaissance.
Many lecturers preach teamwork, but they do not practice it by sharing responsibility for classes. Particularly in a transnational context, inputs from lecturers and learners from various countries might be beneficial for students' learning. This paper asks the question: How can higher education institutions (HEI) set up cross-country and cross-HEI co-teaching to facilitate the transfer of host and home country knowledge? The authors provide insights into a transnational co-teaching project that partly relies on virtual distance learning across countries. This real-life project supports small and medium sized enterprises in their international endeavours with the support of lecturers and student teams from the respective host countries as well as their home countries. The authors discuss advantages and disadvantages of cross-country and cross-HEI co-teaching in comparison to traditional teaching methods. Furthermore, the authors elaborate on the impact of virtual distance learning in comparison to in-class teaching at a single physical location. Due to the international nature of the project, it mainly relies on distance learning that can be very effective when implemented correctly. The paper provides lessons learned from the project that might be beneficial for lecturers with and without international components in their teaching.
Transnational teaching collaborations have many advantages, but also create challenges. Many challenges relate to distances between partner countries. The CAGE (cultural, administrative, geographic, economic) framework helps to assess and classify the impact of various distances. The framework was initially developed for a business context. We test the usability of the CAGE model in a higher education institution (HEI) context by relying on insights from an EU-teaching collaboration project. Within the project, students and lecturers from different HEIs consult real-life firms in going abroad. Teams from the home and the host country of the firms work together in these collaborations. We conclude that the framework is helpful for HEIs. Administrative distances seem to be the most crucial aspect in selecting the right partners for teaching collaborations, whereas geographic and economic distances are manageable. Cultural distances had less of an impact in our setting, but we expect a stronger impact for other projects. The teaching community can learn from the insights of the illustrated collaborations to avoid specific challenges and successfully set up cross-country teaching collaborations.
Higher Education Institutions (HEI)
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