Depending on the level of complexity and novelty of the manufactured products, clusters can be divided into low-tech industrial and high-tech innovative, as well as their combinations. Applied to innovative clusters, their conceptual initiators are, as a rule, high-tech start-ups as the micro-enterprises within MSMEs closely integrated with National, Regional or Local Innovation Ecosystems (NIES, RIES, LIES).
In this last case, the cooperation picture becomes much more complicated and multi-level, including its own upper level of Global Production Networks (GPNs) and Global Innovation Networks (GINs), often featuring the Non-Equity Modes (NEMs).
Given such growing complexity of international innovation clusters in the context of the evolution of its forms of integration into territorial industrial complexes (50s-70s), industrial regions (70s-80s) and Global cities and regions in 90s, intensive development in the “zero” related Global Value Chains, as well as GPNs and GINs of the last decade, the following 6 cluster levels corresponding to respective 6 functions can be distinguished as follows:
contact: icit(at)icit.sk