THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS AN APPLICATION OF BOOLEAN NETWORK MODELING

The analysis of industrial clusters has been carried on until now almost prevalently through the traditional statistical approaches used in empirical research. The growing and promising studies of inter-firm relationships stimulated the application of network methodologies, mostly confined to social network analysis. However, though this methodology gives a lot of interesting results, it suffers of the limitation of being static. In order to overcome this failure, this paper applies the methodology of Boolean networks, which allows a dynamic analysis. More specifically, the focus is on the knowledge exchanges flowing through the network of collaborations for innovation, which is indicated by current literature as a fundamental factor of competitiveness of industrial clusters. In particular, it has been studied the inter-firm transfer of managerial knowledge into the aerospace industrial cluster of the Lazio Region (Italy). Both the application of the Boolean network methodology and the content of the managerial knowledge network are traits of originality respect to the literature on industrial clusters and inter-firm relationships. Moreover, for it uses empirical data and introduces some innovative methodological devices this work can be an example replicable in other studies. The main findings are that the number of attractors are very sensitive to the threshold of activation of firms to transfer knowledge, and that even small changes determine the presence of key-players in the attractors (final stable states).