DATE / TIME:

2013•10•09    12:00 - 13:00

Location:

Maastricht

METEOR/UNU-MERIT joint seminar: “Entrepreneurial Clusters and the Co-agglomeration of Related Industries: Spinoffs in Portuguese Plastics and Molds”

This seminar, featuring Rui Baptista of the Brunel Business School, will focus on a study that provides insights on how co-agglomeration (or collocation) of entrepreneurial firms in related industries influences cluster growth. The study considered two types of effects that may drive collocation:

• the preference of spinoff founders for “home location” leading local spinoffs to “inherit” capabilities from local incumbents (heritage), and
• the benefits associated with agglomeration that stem from local access to supply-side spillovers occurring through worker mobility, informal personal contact, and subcontracting and supplier relations (agglomeration externalities).

These effects are examined for the Portuguese molds and plastics industries. Results suggest that heritage of capabilities, through the transmission of knowledge from incumbents to cross-industry spinoffs, play an important role in driving cluster growth. Benefits from knowledge transmission through cross-industry spinoffs and co-agglomeration occur only upstream, from plastics to molds, implying that while collocation with molds is not a requirement for the plastics industry, collocation with plastics is likely essential for the molds industry.

For more information, see the Calendar of upcoming events on the UNU-MERIT website.

About the speaker

Rui Baptista joined Brunel Business School on September 2013 as the Chair in International Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Centre for Research into Entrepreneurship, International Business and Innovation in Emerging Markets, and has been a faculty member at Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon, Carnegie Mellon University and Indiana University.