What? Is it important to evaluate the clusters?

Emiliano Duch, President of Competitiveness and a founding member of TCI, discusses how to evaluate clusters.

I’m at the The Competitiveness Institute - TCI symposium on evaluation of clusters in Barcelona. Michael Porter at Harvard Business School made the idea famous outside the academic area.

For a government like Vinnova, where I work, clusters simplify practical issues like training, infrastructure development and procurement. They are an effective and popular way to stimulate regional economic growth.
How do you evaluate a cluster initiative? (They are all publicly funded.) Well, it turns out that governments mostly don’t evaluate.

Christian Ketels at Harvard Business School and Stockholm School of Economics have written a good basic about evaluation of clusters.

This symposium is not an academic exercise (conceptual, experts talking about objects, etc), but a very hands-on way on deciding what are the most important issues and how to achieve them.