From the Harvard Business Review:
Today when we talk about business “clusters,”
we’re usually talking about the technology industry in Silicon Valley,
the financial sector in London or New York, or automakers in southern
Germany.
But clusters go back much further than these examples. “Businesses
have clustered into networks of various sorts throughout history,” writes the U.S. National Commission on Entrepreneurship. “The medieval guild system was a primitive networking exercise.”
The most successful, enduring clusters are not stagnant. A look back
at long-lasting clusters highlights the importance of adaptation to
keeping a cluster vibrant, and the catalysts that keep it moving
forward.
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator,” stated Francis Bacon. Nowadays, when a multitude of businesses are confronted with the leap from “dumb” products to creating smart, connected ones,
and cities and regions are trying to make the leap from manufacturing
to services, relying too heavily on past successes will only lock those
clusters in the past.
An example of a cluster that has avoided what I call this “lock-in
syndrome” is Bologna, Italy, one of the most remarkable and long-lasting
clusters of history. Though many people know it for its packaging
machinery cluster, they may not realize the deep historical roots of
this industry, or how much it has evolved over time.
As with many clusters, a university sits at its center: founded in AD 1088, the Studium of
Bologna was the major educational innovation of Europe’s second
millennium. Europe’s first academic university was the epicenter of the
guilds of wandering students (clerici vagantes). Spanning
geographical barriers and shrinking the world of education, the
resulting exchange of ideas between students and professors in a climate
of freedom generated interactive spaces for knowledge creation,
dissemination, and sharing. Those spaces were reservoirs rich in
memories from which lessons for cluster formation would be extracted
later.
About two hundred years later, towards the end of the thirteenth
century, we start to see the first Bolognese silk mills, which became a
major industry. The major innovation lay in an extraordinary machine
already in use in Lucca, about 150 kilometers southwest of Bologna. This
round, mechanical spinning machine was capable of twisting dozens and
dozens of threads at the same time. The innovation of the Bolognese silk
makers was to operate the Lucca machine with a hydraulic wheel, instead
of by hand. Thanks to this technological innovation—made possible by Bologna’s canals and ample supply of water—by the 15th century, Bolognese mills had expanded from small-scale production to busy factories that took up three or four floors. Long before the Industrial Revolution,
Bologna used this combination of hydraulic power and technology to
bring silkworm farming to Europe at scale. Bolognese yarns were sold to
the doges of Venice or exchanged for spices and salt, and they were also
exported to the large international markets, to France, Germany,
England and even to the East.
But when Industrial Revolution did arrive, it shook the Bolognese silk
industry. In Bologna at the end of the 18th century, changing consumer
tastes, labor costs, and production technologies all led to the
contraction of the industry. The result was a deep and prolonged
recession.
Nonetheless,
today, the Bolognese “Packaging Valley” stands out internationally for
its ability to meet the specialized needs of manufacturers throughout
the world....MUCH MORE
