This paper discusses the role of so-called national champions within the context of the EU's ambitious goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic region in the world by 2010. We find football to be a useful analogy in our discussion of national champions. There are...

This paper takes a different perspective toward the escape entry incentive of incumbent firms to innovate. New entrants spawned from incumbents are not necessarily a threat; they can complement incumbents' production by commercializing knowledge incumbents are not willing or able to exploit....

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

If one cluster increases local competitiveness, can politicians, by interlinking clusters, achieve an even better effect at the state level? To answer this question, the paper analyzes the "Cluster Initiative" introduced in 1999 by the Bavarian State Government. The purpose of the initiative was...