Industry Cluster And Its Competitive Advantage

Industrial Cluster has been a new trend in the development of international industries and a new form in the corporate competition in an environment in which globalization, informationalization and networklization are the main characteristics of economy. In 1998, M. E. Porter published a influential paper named Clusters and New Economics of Competition in Harvard Business Review, which turned out to be the start that industrial cluster became one of the focus of research in economics and management. In this dissertation, we focus on the analysis of the evolution, nature and characteristics of cluster and the competitive advantage of industrial clusters. What's more, we give a in depth analysis of the mechanisms that generate these advantages. We use literature review, theoretic logic reasoning, case study and system analysis as the main research method in this paper and we use some second hand empirical results as referencesIn theory, the research on industrial cluster will not only add some challenges and new approach to traditional researches but will also realize the transformation in the economic research from " the point competitive advantage" to " cluster "competitive advantage", from "economics of competition" to "economics of cooperation" and from "the dichotomy of firm-market" to " the trisection of firm-network-market". In practice, the research on the industrial cluster can provide a new framework for the development of regional economics, facilitate the upgrading of the industrial structure and the creation the regional manufacturing base.We suggest the competitive advantage of cluster can be classified as advantage in access to resources advantage in innovation and the birth of new businesses, advantage in efficiency of market transactions and advantage in cluster expansion. The mechanism that generates these advantages consists of the mechanism of concentrated division of work and the collaboration and sharing mechanism of knowledge. We testify the industrial cluster's effect to improve the competitive advantage through the study on two typical industrial clusters, one of which is a domestic one and the other on is an abroad one. We propose some suggestions and solutions to the setting of policies and development of industrial cluster as the end of this dissertation.