Entrepreneurial Growth in Industrial Districts illustrates that Industrial Districts (ID) have dramatically changed over the past three decades; the Marshallian notion of a cluster of small firms has been vastly transformed by the emergence of rapidly growing firms.

Entrepreneurship, Growth and Innovation provides comprehensive insight into the economics of entrepreneurship, claiming that this recently established discipline should establish a framework of analysis that integrates the understanding of the determinants and the effects of both entrepreneurship and innovation without neglecting the functioning of the inducement mechanisms. For this purpose, the book combines theoretical prescriptions and international empirical evidence. Contributions by some of the best known scholars in the field of the economics of entrepreneurship and innovation investigate whether the interrelationships between the forces that affect firm and industry dynamics and ultimately determine economic growth are subject to change across countries and over time. The analysis of different national cases puts forward that the relationship between entrepreneurship and growth via innovation is shaped by the context of country-specific institutions and industries, thereby providing hints for industrial and innovation policy.

Regional economic development has experienced considerable dynamism over recent years. Perhaps the most notable cases were the rise of China and India to emergent country status by the turn of the millennium.

During the 1980s the Marshallian concept of industrial district (ID) became widely popular due to the resurgence of interest in the reasons that make the agglomeration of specialised industries a territorial phenomenon worth being analysed. The analysis of clusters and IDs has often been limited, considering only the local dimension of the created business networks. The external links of these systems have been systematically under-evaluated. This book offers a deep insight into the evolution of these systems and the internal-external mechanism of knowledge circulation and learning. This means that the access to external knowledge (information or R&D cooperative research) or to productive networks (global supply chains) is studied in order to describe how external knowledge is absorbed and how local clusters or districts become global systems. It provides a unified approach; showing that existing capabilities expand when locally embedded knowledge is combined with accessible external knowledge. In this view, external knowledge linkages reduce the danger of cognitive ‘lock-in’ and ‘over-embeddedness’, which may become important obstacles to local learning and innovation when technological trajectories and global economic conditions change. A selection of international experts

'A Handbook of Industrial Districts is a very well-organized and structured collection of scientific works on the theory of industrial districts.' - Roberta Capello, Regional Studies In this comprehensive original reference work, the editors have brought together an unrivalled group of distinguished scholars and practitioners to comment on the historical and contemporary role of industrial districts.

The book contains a selection of papers on business clusters in its multiple perspectives. It has evolved from the research symposium organized by the The Society for Global Business and Economic Development (SGBED), an international group of academicians, at Dubai during January 2009. It begins with an introduction to the concept of clusters, and then examines their link to a host of strategic issues, such as their nexus to competitive advantage, their performance vis-à-vis their competitors who are not similarly agglomerated, and the challenges in measuring the performance of clusters. Regional economic clusters have serious policy implications. Governments, local as well as national, have used clusters as the unit for investment and infrastructure upgrading policies. It focuses on the normative aspects as well as practices and provides pointers on how public policies can help the development and growth of regional economic clusters. With numerous examples and cases from a host countries such as Dubai, Mexico, Spain and Karnataka (India), the book is a must read for all students of business strategy.

øIn the geography of the global economy, there are known Šhot spots� where new technologies germinate at an astounding rate and pools of capital, expertise and talent foster the development of new industries and new ways of doing business. These cluste