The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods

Making strategy: the journey of strategic management

While the conditions for creating clusters and modalities of how clusters should be configured have been investigated intensively, evidence about the performance evaluation of public cluster policy is scarce. This paper addresses this issue and investigates the promotion of ‘leading-edge clusters’ by the German federal government in 2007 as a part of the “High-Tech Strategy 2020”. Based on a unique balanced panel including all 150 German metropolitan areas ranging from 1998 to 2012, we apply treatment and difference-in-differences estimation techniques to evaluate this kind of governmental cluster policy. These leading-edge clusters, selected and intensively supported by the government, encompass 21 of the total 150 German metropolitan areas. In particular, we evaluate whether the treated clusters show a different performance path compared to the control group. Our results strongly support the effect of an active public cluster policy measured by regional GDP growth, yet highlight the importance of robust evaluation approaches and techniques. Our results also shed light on the complementary effects of pre-existing entrepreneurial and innovative ecosystems to spur regional wealth and make cluster policy successful at work.

Public cluster policy and performance

https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/137826551/preprint.pdf

The effect of public support on senior manager attitudes to innovation

Using a sample of SMEs from 28 European countries, this study evaluates the input and output additionality of national and EU R&D programmes both separately and in combination. Accordingly, we contribute to understanding the effectiveness of policy mix, in this case of innovation policy from the perspective of multi-level governance. Empirical results are quite different for innovation inputs and innovation outputs. For innovation inputs, we found positive treatment effects from both national and EU programmes separately as well as complementary effects for firms supported from both sources relative to firms supported only by national programmes. For innovation outputs, we report no evidence of additionality from national programmes and cannot reject crowding out from EU programmes. However, crowding out from EU support is eliminated by combination with national support. These findings have policy implications for the governance of R&D policy and suggest that the European Paradox – success of EU support in promoting R&D inputs but not commercialisation – is not yet mitigated.

/pdf/r-d-programmes-policy-mix-and-the-european-paradox-evidence-1rhmvcd8j6.pdf

R&D Programmes, Policy Mix, and the ‘European Paradox’: Evidence from European SMEs

https://enterpriseresearch.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ERC-RP4-Babski-et-al1.pdf

Assessing an experimental approach to industrial policy evaluation: Applying RCT+ to the case of Creative Credits

This report examines the results of a pilot study, which used a method of evaluation called randomised control trials (RCTs) to see if a popular business support scheme called Creative Credits worked effectively. The pilot study, which began in Manchester in 2009, was structured so that vouchers, or 'Creative Credits', would be randomly allocated to small and medium-sized businesses applying to invest in creative projects such as developing websites, video production and creative marketing campaigns, to see if they had a real effect on innovation. The research found that the firms who were awarded Creative Credits enjoyed a short-term boost in their innovation and sales growth in the six months following completion of their creative projects. However, the positive effects were not sustained, and after 12 months there was no longer a statistically significant difference between the groups that received the credits and those that didn’t. The report argues that these results would have remained hidden using the normal evaluation methods used by government, and calls for RCTs to be used more widely when evaluating policies to support business growth.

Nicola Rathbone

Papers

Assessing an experimental approach to industrial policy evaluation: Applying RCT+ to the case of Creative Credits

Creative credits:a randomized controlled industrial policy experiment