Do Top-Down Cluster Policies Succeed in Fostering Social Capital and Innovation?

In the last decades, the cluster approach to innovation has become very influential among policymakers. Clusters are recognized as the primary locus of social capital (SC) and civic engagement and are thus able to foster company innovativeness. This chapter investigates the effectiveness of top-down cluster policies in creating new SC and the ability of this SC to create new intellectual capital (IC), hence improving firms’ innovativeness. For this purpose, two case studies about top-down clusters in Italy were developed. While in literature the SC-IC-innovation link has been largely investigated as well as the power of traditional clusters to promote SC, to the knowledge of the authors, the same power has not been investigated with reference to top-down clusters. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate such links, thus contributing to fill a gap in the extant literature. Examination of the cases in this study revealed almost opposite results in terms of the links investigated.