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When Albemarle Corporation was created as a $2.2 billion spin off of Ethyl Corporation's specialty chemical businesses in 1994, president and COO Gary Cook found himself at the helm of a company that lacked viable strategies for growth. Its production processes were driven by tradition, not the marketplace. Manufacturing and R&D barely communicated, and no one spoke to marketing. Worst of all, no one paid attention to the customer. Clearly radical change was in order, and the order of the day in 1994 was reengineering. Learning as he went, Cook discovered what he called the “seven really obvious” truths about the much maligned, often mismanaged, and sometimes successful practice of reengineering.

Within academic literature, there has been a burgeoning of literature in the field of economic geography which has centred on the nature of local concentrations of economic activity, with particular interest on those which are most dynamic, variously styled as clusters (Porter, 1990; Swann, Prevezer, & Stout, 1998), innovative milieux (Camagni, 1991), industrial districts (Piore & Sable, 1984), new industrial spaces (Scott, 1988) and nodes (Amin & Thrift, 1992). Such intense interest among geographers stands in contrast to the relatively more muted impact within the management, and more specifically, the strategy field (Audretsch, 2000). What makes this particularly odd are firstly, the intense interest of policy makers that has been stimulated by the seminal work of Porter (1990), and secondly the manifest claim and implication of much of the extant literature that the existence of dynamic clusters is at once both a result of corporate strategies and also a vital consideration which should inform strategic thinking. This chapter assesses the extent to which one of the UK's most successful clusters behaves in ways which are consistent with Porter's positive statements about the nature of clusters. In doing so, the chapter will consider insights which the wider literature offers on how and when concentrations of economic activity will give rise to superior performance, at least among some of the firms located there, which do not feature prominently in Porter's thinking. In particular, it will explore Martin and Sunley's (2003) critique of Porter's clusters concept and its utility as a basis for regional development policy. It will also consider recent contributions which claim that the resource-based theory (RBT) of the firm offers a superior framework for thinking about the strategic implications of clusters for corporate strategy, rather than the more industrial organization-based lens through which Porter views this issue. This chapter concludes that a synthesis is warranted rather than an attempt to claim that one view is correct and the other wrong.

As observed above, the problems of HTSF financing have been a major development issue for HTSFs and the HTSF conference since its inception in 1993, and have often provided a subject for substantial sub-sections in the book series. However, in this instance, a single offering is provided in Chapter 2 by Xia and Minshall. This work gives a very detailed and comprehensive review of the problems that have existed for many years with the funding of new high-technology firms. There is a very well-balanced view presented on the roles of public and private sector capital and, in particular, on how these two types of investment funding might be best combined to provide the better future support of HTSFs.

In Chapter 2, providing a contextual introduction to the issue of university spin-offs, Hogan and Quan Zhou seek to construct a better definition of what the term ‘spin-off’ should consist. After a wide-ranging review of previous attempts to define and classify aspects of the spin-off process, the authors offer their own ‘three-point’ checklist which seeks to clarify and define the ‘spin-off’ process. In conclusion, their paper seeks to assess the advantages and drawbacks of the system they recommend. This initial paper in this section is welcome since it illustrates that not only do academics differ over how to assist the ‘spin-off’ process, but they also often do not agree on how this process is to be defined.

A broad range of policy evaluations below is begun in Chapter 2 by Kate Johnston, Colette Henry and Simon Gillespie in their evaluation entitled ‘Encouraging Research and Development in Ireland's Biotechnology Enterprises’. This investigation critically evaluates Irish government policy towards biotechnology development over a preceding 10-year period. In Chapter 3, Anthony Ward, Sarah Cooper, Frank Cave and William Lucas examine ‘The Effect of Industrial Experience on Entrepreneurial Intent and Self-Efficacy in UK Engineering Undergraduates’ in a large-scale study that generally produces satisfactory results in terms of raising the profile of entrepreneurship among undergraduates. Deirdre Hunt, in Chapter 4, again focuses on the evolution of strategy in Ireland, this time towards the more general topic of new firm formation with a personal contribution entitled ‘Now You See Them — Now You Don’t: Paradoxes in Enterprise Development Strategy: The Case of the Disappearing Academic Start-Ups’.