| dc.description.abstractEN | Industry clusters have sparked interest from academia and practice, for decades. The concentration of innovative activity, value creation, and collaborative dynamics within a region that is coined as a cluster, manifests the opportunity for research from a plethora of perspectives (cf. with Zhang and Lam 2017 and Zhang and Lam 2013 that utilize and develop methodologies for specific case studies). At the same time, maritime clusters have drawn special attention from policy, since the maritime domain can provide sustainable regional, and even national, competitive advantages (this can be drawn from many instances within the literature, with one of the most indicative being Doloreux and Melançon 2006, where the importance of policy with reference to the competitiveness of the region becomes apparent). Maritime clusters are dynamic entities of industry that businesses and nations are adamant to foster. These clusters have provided many benchmarks for research as well, although, one research domain that has not been tapped into extensively, is that of strategic management (Pardali et al. 2017; Salvador 2014). Research has provided intermittent evidence of the importance of strategy within clusters, although the body of research is far from developed (as is evident in Doloreux 2017). The objective of this work is to provide the foundation of the body of strategic management for maritime clusters. The latter has materialized through three latent directions that formulate the sections of this thesis. The first is the contribution within the theory of maritime clusters (inclusive of the implications of strategic management); the second pertains to strategic analysis of maritime clusters, and the third includes the formulation of instruments for strategic management of maritime clusters. The contribution of this research involves the baseline of the domain of strategic management within maritime clusters that includes the proof of its importance for the body of research, as well as the formulation of instruments that can benefit both academia and practice. | el |
