The environmental technology industry is considered generally as a growing industry driven
by urging climate-, energy- and waste problems, regulations and increasing environmental
consciousness, among others. Upper Austria often referred to as an industrial region features a
heterogeneous group of environmental technology firms that are outperforming other regions
in Austria in terms of firm numbers and employees in this sector. Following the main
theoretical approaches on cluster life cycles and cluster evolution this paper examines factors
on firm and cluster level on different spatial scales that have affected the emergence and
evolution of individual environmental technology enterprises and its cluster in Upper Austria.
The aim of the paper is to get a profound understanding of the relevance of these factors and
to evaluate their development over time. The paper uses primary data from 30 face-to-face
firm interviews with managerial staff.
Preliminary results suggest that factors relevant for the development of Upper Austrian
environmental technology firms geographically shift and change over. Location factors that
caused firms to settle in Upper Austria show a rather strong connectivity of the company
founder to the region. Hence, personal factors and partners in the region are more relevant
compared to other factors. At a later stage, factors such as skilled labour and networks
become more important on regional level whereas other factors such as demand, regulations
and public support initiatives are more relevant on national and international levels. From an
evolutionary perspective factors such as demand and corporate partners become nationally
and internationally more important over time, others that are mostly associated with
knowledge transfer remain on the regional scale. Overall, we find tendencies of growth and
geographically enlarged interaction scales of the Upper Austrian environmental technology
cluster as well as a certain persistence of related ties to the regional and national innovation
system. (authors' abstract) / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:4440 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Auer, Alexander, Tödtling, Franz |
| Publisher | WU Vienna University of Economics and Business |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Paper, NonPeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Relation | http://epub.wu.ac.at/4440/ |
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