The dynamics of a regional development cluster can tell us a lot about business development. The complex processes within the cluster generate a value-creating context of a very special kind. To increase our knowledge of business development, and specifically how the context facilitates the business development, we decided to study the different kinds of actors and dynamics of a regional development cluster. There are good reasons to choose Sophia Antipolis for such a study.

Sophia Antipolis differs from most other regional clusters as it was created as a genuine greenfield operation in the true sense of the word. From the very start there were only the green soft hills just north of the French Riviera, without any university, major industry or local demand. It was just an idea to create a high tech cluster and it took off more as an administrative regional development process to later on provide self generated growth. After more than 30 years we can today see how Sophia Antipolis has developed into a promising high tech cluster of its own kind.

In this report we have focused on the context for the business development processes and not so much on the individual companies, although we have included a few business cases. We are in this study not so interested in how individual companies manoeuvre during the development process within a cluster, but rather to understand how the context develops and hence improves the conditions for business development. As business organisations develop from well-defined entities to networks and value-creating constellations, the definition of what is the organisation and what is the environment becomes more blurred. This is the major reason why we want to increase the knowledge of the business development context.

Download full report

Download presentation of conclusions

back