Guest Editorial

New trends in the development of Hungarian clusters: The case of the Southern Great Plain region

“…The territories of RISs are not limited to certain areas, but are rather integrated into other national and international systems involving more stakeholders. Furthermore, the policies of industrial districts are implemented in predefined areas, whereas the cluster and RIS concepts are incorporated into global production systems (Benneworth et al 2003, Coe et al 2004.…”

The Role of Domestic and International External Cluster Linkages Explored on the Example of Buyer–Supplier Relations in Learning Regions: A Cross-Functional Assessment

“…The economic relevance of regions is usually derived from the competitive advantages of firm-specific interactions within a particular regional setting of industries and institutions, usually addressed in terms of regional industrial clusters. While it is well known that industrial clusters serve as the backbone of regional competitiveness, however, it is still unclear which approaches to the analysis of clusters provide conceptually sound, empirically significant and politically viable research perspectives (Benneworth et al, 2003;Benneworth & Henry, 2004;Martin & Sunley, 2003). A paradigmatic definition by Porter (1998, p. 199) defines clusters as "a geographically proximate group of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities" (p. 199).…”

Logistics clusters, including inter-firm relations through community detection

“…inter-firm relations), most of the cluster studies do not measure linkages when discussing the network's structure but limit themselves to analysing geographical concentrations of employment. While this can be explained by a lack of data, it remains imprudent to derive the existence of relations from the presence of spatial concentration (Benneworth et al, 2003;. The objective of this paper is to study co-location as well as inter-firm linkages in the Belgian logistics industry.…”