New Businesses and Regional Development

Abstract

Globalization has had an enormous impact on traditional industrial structures — one could even go so far as to say a “shattering” impact. Increasing competition has led to a greater variety of products at low price-cost margins and sellers’ markets are rapidly evolving into buyers’ markets. Today, consumers expect increasingly customized products so that mass production capability is not necessarily the advantage it once was (Piore and Sable 1984). This is especially true for the automotive industry (Womack et al. 1990), where statistics show that producing two cars that are exactly the same color and have exactly the same equipment options happens about as often as a blue moon.

Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This chapter is based on Falck O, Heblich S (2007) Dynamic Clusters. Bavarian Program in Economics BGPE Working Paper 16.