Welcome to the Cluster Profiles, an information web site of the Institute for
Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.
About the Cluster Profiles
The Cluster Profiles are a set of standardized descriptions
of more than 800 industry clusters in 52 countries, ranging from watches in Hong Kong, tufted carpets
in Southwest Flanders, and wine in Napa Valley.
Each profile measures a cluster in up to 120 dimensions including:
- basic descriptive data such as a cluster's name, location
and employment.
- statistics covering cluster
competitiveness such as world export share, growth,
and measures of innovative capacity.
- complex qualitative information concerning the reasons
behind the cluster's competitiveness, its rise, and sometimes also its decline.
These profiles have been culled from a large body of literature
on clusters that has been created in recent years by cluster
practitioners and academic researchers alike. We strove to collect data from as broad a range of cluster
literature as possible, with the extremes ranging from detailed
one-hundred-page studies of individual clusters to more cursory
descriptions of clusters in newspaper articles. For your convenience
we have marked (+) those Cluster Profiles which contain only basic
descriptive data. Approximately one-third of the Cluster Profiles
fall into this category.
Our purpose in assembling this data is:
- to support research analyzing the locational, economic and
competitive characteristics of clusters, the reasons behind
their competitiveness, and their patterns of evolution over time. Indeed, compiling the Cluster Profiles was a first step in
our own Cluster Meta-Study. Follow the link at the left to
see a presentation on some findings from this study.
- to create a bibliographic reference of cluster literature for
researchers and practitioners. A consolidated listing is
available from the link at the left.
- to facilitate an ongoing sharing of data on clusters. For that
purpose, we are distributing the Cluster Template used to create
the Profiles to interested researchers and practitioners. More information is available from the link at the left.
For additional information,
