Clusters, entrepreneurial ecosystem co-creation, and appropriability: a conceptual framework

Extant literature on clusters underplays the role of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial management in creating and co-creating organizations, markets, and supporting ecosystems. We employ transaction costs, resource-knowledge-capabilities and power-control-based theories to provide a comparative static governance-based perspective on clusters. We embed this into a more general co-evolutionary entrepreneurial theory of the emergence, evolution and co-evolution of markets, ecosystems, and clusters. We suggest that clusters can involve advantages that help engender superior appropriation of co-created value, as compared to alternatives. Entrepreneurial managers, faced with a degree of choice, will help co-create clusters and be part of them, for as long as they can appropriate more value in this way than through alternatives.