Blog Post #1: What are Regional Innovation Clusters?
What does the renewable energy industry in Colorado, the battery industry in Michigan, and Indiana’s own life sciences industry all have in common? All of these are regional industry clusters, and perhaps more importantly, they are highly innovative “Regional Innovation Clusters.”
A recent study by the Brookings Institute entitled The New Cluster Moment: How Regional Innovation Clusters can Foster the Next Economy identified the importance of thinking differently about economic development. The study reinforced the idea, as the recent recession reminded us all, that a new approach to economic development is needed; an approach that depends less on bubbles and consumption. Brookings’ answer, as well as many others, is “Regional Innovation Clusters.”
What is a regional innovation cluster? The idea of “clusters” as a tool for economic development was introduced by Michael Porter, the famed Harvard Business School professor twenty years ago. A cluster is a geographic concentration of interconnected firms and supporting or coordinating organizations and associated institutions, such as universities.
The Brookings study recognized regional economies and clusters as “hot spots of productivity and collaboration” and are innovation and opportunity driven. In the end, supporting cluster development will promote growth in productivity, wages and jobs. Perhaps Porter himself said it best when wrote, “there is no national economy…but a series of regional economies that trade with each other and the rest of the world”.
Leave a Reply