This paper shows the performance of eighty leading innovative local clusters on six measures of enterprise performance: share of new and young firms and growth of employment, turnover, profitability, liquidity ratio and solvency ratio. The data show the performance of clusters before and during the global economic crisis and suggest that clusters doing well in the phase of economic expansion had different characteristics from those that were able to grow in a time of economic slowdown. The data permit comparison of performance among the clusters. In the pre-recession period the two top performing clusters were the Madison Research District and Silicon Valley in the United States, while during the recession the two leading clusters were the Coimbra Biotech cluster in Portugal and Daedoek Science Town in Korea.
The Cluster Scoreboard
Measuring the Performance of Local Business Clusters in the Knowledge Economy
