Abstract
Among the more recent instruments of spatial planning in South Korea is the designation of innovation clusters. Gangwon province, a partner province of Hanns-Seidel-Foundation, has designated three clusters for life sciences/biotechnology, new materials and medical science. Given the enormous center-periphery problems in Korea, where the capital region (Seoul, Incheon, Gyeonggi province) comprises nearly than half of the population of the country, such strategies to implement high technology production into the province are understandable. However, can it be successful and sustainable? This paper discusses the cluster strategy of Gangwon province and the challenges of innovation clusters in a peripheral region.
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Notes
- 1.
Krugman (1994), p. 70.
- 2.
However, Kim (2003) showed that these effects are only imagined; they are not mirrored in regional income disparities.
- 3.
A different though related problem is that of the alleged “race to the bottom”. Deregulation around the world, some critics maintained, would result in a competition to offer the lowest standards. However, though there are highly visible and widely discussed single indicators for the quality of a location (e.g. certain tax rates), investors decide not on the basis of one such indicator, but on a complex “bundle of institutions”, which means that the simple race to the bottom, as forecast in partial models, in reality has not occurred.
- 4.
- 5.
A complete discussion of industrial policy development and problems cannot be carried out here. But for the problems of “picking the winners” in the European context, see Maincent and Navarro (2006), for an economic policy perspective see Rodrik (2004). For the ongoing policy debate, see the special issue of the Journal for Industry, Competition and Trade, Special Issue on the Future of Industrial Policy, Vol. 7, 2007.
- 6.
For an introduction see Fujita et al. (1999).
- 7.
Hornycha and Schwartz (2009) show this for East Germany.
- 8.
In this respect, it is also important that clusters themselves, like companies, undergo life-cycles a process of emergence, growth, decline and renewal, which is determined, among others, by the technological heterogeneity of firms and the relative absorptive capacity of firms for new knowledge. (Menzel and Fornahl 2010). Therefore, cluster policies must also be tailored to fit the relevant phase in the life-cycle of the cluster.
- 9.
- 10.
Ramstad (2009) points out that these policies, while today mainly focusing on innovation in science and technology, should also include organisational innovations. Similarly, Rosiello (2008) stresses that besides technological factors and independent from them, knowledge, interconnected with questions of industrial development, economic viability, public safety and social acceptability, contributes to the emergence of innovative products and processes.
- 11.
For example, for some emerging markets like China incentives for the return of migrated scientists played an important role; see Prevezer (2008).
- 12.
The study of six Norwegian innovation clusters by Isaksen (2009) finds a strong link between regional innovation activity and local higher education institutions’ specializing in areas that cater to the needs of key regional industries. However, as Ponds et al. (2010) point out the knowledge spillovers from academic research on regional innovation activities are crucially dependent on successful university-industry collaboration networks.
- 13.
Certainly, this is a very complex task, requiring appropriate education about entrepreneurship, beginning in primary school, appropriate technological education, and incentive systems among other needs.
- 14.
The issue of regional collective learning and possible biases towards mistrust and rivalry instead of collaboration has been recently analyzed in the case of a South German surgical instrument cluster. Staber (2009) points out that from an evolutionary point of view with the limited cognitive abilities of agents results of collective learning might be either functional or dysfunctional for the cluster.
- 15.
See the study of Kaufmann and Schwartz (2008).
- 16.
The anti-monde problem means that we do not really know what could be achieved with a different resource allocation. The impossibility to measure this effect does not mean that the effect has no importance.
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Seliger, B. (2012). The Role of the State in Qualitative Growth – A Consideration of Regional Innovation Clusters in Gangwon Province (South Korea). In: Mahlich, J., Pascha, W. (eds) Korean Science and Technology in an International Perspective. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2753-8_10
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