The current trend towards globalization is posing a substantial challenge to SME clusters to restructure and reach out to distant markets and knowledge sources, while at the same time exploiting the advantages of local factors and agglomeration. This book represents a first attempt to analyze these issues in detail, employing novel empirical evidence. The authors focus on small- and medium-sized entreprises (SMEs) in Italy and Taiwan, two countries in which these businesses characterize the national industrial structure. They find that in the current climate of globalization, there is no best...

The current trend towards globalization is posing a substantial challenge to SME clusters to restructure and reach out to distant markets and knowledge sources, while at the same time exploiting the advantages of local factors and agglomeration. This book represents a first attempt to analyze these issues in detail, employing novel empirical evidence. Taiwan, two countries in which these businesses characterize the national industrial structure. They find that in the current climate of globalization, there is no best practice model for organizing an industrial cluster since a diversity of...

After more than fifty years of systematic research on multinational enterprises (MNEs) what is apparent is that there is, as yet, no unified or dominant theory of the MNE. The objective of this book is to bring into focus one particular dimension of MNE behaviour and activity that has been relatively under-researched - namely the geography of the multinational enterprise - as understood through the lens of innovation and technological change. The authors clearly demonstrate that geography is becoming increasingly important for MNEs and, in turn, MNEs are becoming progressively more important...