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Business people and professionals come together regularly at trade fairs, exhibitions, conventions,
congresses, and conferences. Here, their latest and most advanced findings, inventions and products
are on display to be evaluated by customers and suppliers, as well as by peers and competitors.
Participation in events like these helps firms to identify the current market frontier, take stock of
relative competitive positions and form future plans. Such events exhibit many of the characteristics
ascribed to permanent spatial clusters, albeit in a temporary and intensified form. These short-lived
hotspots of intense knowledge exchange, network building and idea generation can thus be seen as
temporary clusters. The present paper compares temporary clusters with permanent clusters and
other types of inter-firm interactions. If regular participation in temporary clusters can satisfy a
firm’s need to learn through interaction with suppliers, customers, peers and rivals, why is the
phenomenon of permanent spatial clustering of similar and related economic activity so pervasive?
The answer, it is claimed, lies in the restrictions imposed upon economic activity when knowledge and ideas are transformed into valuable products and services. The paper sheds new light on how
interaction among firms in current clusters coincides with knowledge-intensive pipelines between
firms in different regions or clusters. In doing so, it offers a novel way of understanding how interfirm
knowledge relationships are organized spatially and temporally. |
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