Innovation in Clusters

3The Cluster Imaginary: Tools, Local Narrative and Promise

In this world of success stories, innovation awards and dissemination of good practices, cluster administrators at the local level show that they, too, are part of the game. Thus, based on a particular cluster, this chapter reveals the imaginary that is locally conveyed to public and private financiers, as well as to laboratories and businesses, to encourage them to set up there. To do this, the cluster studied uses performative instruments such as benchmarking, territorial marketing and visual instrumentation techniques; a narrative based on a particular local history that is conducive to scientific research and industrial development; finally, a series of promises linked to employment in the territory and to the innovations enabled by the cluster. All of these resources act on the representations of individuals and lead to the construction of a sociotechnical imaginary (Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun 2009), which, through the rhetoric of innovation, images and tables, promises a desirable future.

3.1. Performative instruments: benchmarking, territorial marketing, visual instrumentation

The biocluster’s Communication Department is setting in place a range of tools that showcase a high-performance, dense and collaborative biocluster through rankings, dashboards, diagrams and visuals.

3.1.1. Benchmarking or territorial mimicry

We have just seen how supranational institutions, such as the OECD or the European Union, are implementing ...