Knowledge transfer through clusters

Abstract

Clusters are viewed as a subject worth attention paid by scholars and politicians for they are able to add to regional economy development through various outcomes of their performance. Valuable observations are made on how the clusters performance could be estimated. Scientific literature suggests that innovation, knowledge transfer, social networks, collaboration, regional/ national proximity, competitiveness, research and development (R&D) is an integral part of cluster studies. The aim of this study is to suggest a tool, which would allow evaluating the efficiency of clusters performance in terms of knowledge transfer, understood in the most general way. There are various aspects of cluster performance emphasized by different researchers. We offer a system of indicators, which could be used for cluster performance description where transfer of knowledge is the key phenomenon taken into account. It is offered to include 44 indicators into the system used for cluster performance evaluation. The indicators are attributed into three groups according to different facets that they represent. The groups are named as Resources, Activities and Processes. Transfer of knowledge is viewed as a very important part of cluster performance and is ascribed to activities, which are difficult to measure. For integration of the indicators included into the system we employ one of multi-criteria methods, specifically, SAW method. The results suggest that clusters, which show good results with processes, stay in high positions, while clusters, which are keeping behind with processes, show worse results in cluster performance. This system of indicators could be used in further research to detect if these three groups of indicators should be rated the same for clusters belonging to different sectors