Clusters, Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Co-Creation, and Appropriability: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract:     
Extant literature on clusters underplays the role of purposive human action, particularly the role of appropriability-informed entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial management, in leveraging strategy to create and co-create organizations, markets and supporting ecosystems. We employ transaction costs, resource-knowledge-capabilities and power-control-based theories to first provide a comparative static, governance-based perspective on clusters. We then build on this to propose an appropriability-informed entrepreneurial theory of the emergence, evolution and co-evolution of markets, ecosystems, and clusters. We suggest that clusters can involve advantages, due to socio-locational embeddedness, that help engender superior appropriable value to alternatives such as integration by firms, markets and other forms of inter-firm co-operation, and that entrepreneurial managers, faced with a degree of choice, will help co-create clusters and be part of them, for as long as they can appropriate more value in this way, than through alternatives.

Keywords: clusters, comparative governance, entrepreneurship, market and ecosystem co-creation

JEL Classification: M13, G34, L10, L20

Accepted Paper Series