Summary

It is not particularly difficult to come up with long lists of activities regarding how to promote competitiveness in clusters; there is a body of literature on this (see, for instance, Table 1). Accordingly, any actor who wants to launch an innovation initiative in a given cluster has at his disposal a broad menu of possible instruments; Table 2 presents a number of them. What is somewhat less developed is the body of literature which addresses not the question of what to do but rather how to do it, i.e. the issue of methodologies to secure an effective implementation of instruments.

Table 1: Common features of cluster-based policy in OECD countries

Vigorous competition and regulatory reform policy Providing strategic information through technology foresight studies, cluster studies, special research groups, or special Web sites Broker and network agencies and schemes Cluster development programmes Joint industry-research centres of excellence Public procurement policy Institutional renewal in industrial policy making Providing platforms for constructive dialogue

When looking into successful cluster-initiatives and asking for critical success factors one often finds idiosyncratic factors – strong leadership by some charismatic local actors, a strong sense of community, strong personal relations between key actors, and the like. But parachuting a charismatic leader into a cluster to start an innovation initiative does not appear like a particularly sound proposal – it is not exactly a methodology, and charisma is often acquired through successful action. What comes to mind in terms of thinking about methodologies is the whole set of participatory methods which have been developed in fields such as community development and which are labeled "action research", "participatory rapid appraisal", or "participatory learning and action". Such approaches have a number of distinct advantages:

• being participatory, they tend to be bottom-up, addressing motivational issues as a crucial element,
• they are explicitly learning-oriented and thus superior to traditional sequential, planning-oriented approaches,
• they are highly flexible and thus permit to include whatever motivation and issue comes up in the process of an unfolding cluster-based innovation initiative.

Using such instruments is not always easy, since resistance from certain actors has to be overcome. Government officials sometimes find the idea of participation questionable and prefer hierarchical approaches. Researchers tend to find such approaches not sufficiently "scientific". Nevertheless, in our work in Brazil, stimulating local competitiveness initiatives, we have found these approaches extremely useful.

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