Past Tense and Present Perfect

In today's global markets, companies have many choices to procure what they need to develop, build, and sell product. So who needs a manufacturing cluster, such as Detroit? Research by Gary Pisano and Giulio Buciuni shows that in some industries, location still matters.

Globalization hasn't made manufacturing clusters obsolete, but the geographically concentrated pockets of industry have to be smart to ensure their survival, according to new research from Harvard Business School.

Gary P. Pisano, the Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration at HBS, and researcher Giulio Buciuni, of the University of Venice Ca' Foscari, address the question of when clusters survive and when they fail in their May 2015 working paper, Can Marshall's Clusters Survive Globalization?

“I THINK PEOPLE IN GENERAL THINK WELL, THERE'S GLOBALIZATION SO THERE'S NO NEED FOR CLUSTERS”

Pisano and Buciuni looked to four industrial clusters in northeastern Italy for their answer. Italy "is a great laboratory because it's been historically organized around these very specific districts all over the country. Every area is associated with a particular industry," Pisano says.

Clusters are not a new concept, notably studied in the United Kingdom by Alfred Marshall—he called them industrial districts—in the early 1900s. Manufacturing clusters can seemingly happen in any industry in any location, from winemaking in Northern California to automaking in Detroit. Clusters typically build up around a geographic location where natural resources, an appropriately educated labor force, and a university or other research institution co-mingle.

In recent years, some economists have argued that manufacturing clusters are dying out because geographic location is less important to business success. In today's global markets, companies have many choices to procure what they need to develop, build, and sell product.

Pisano and Buciuni wanted to test the theory of the dying cluster. "I think people in general think well, there's globalization so there's no need for clusters," Pisano says. "What we came to is it really depends. It's not all or one.

Sumber: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/globalization-hasnt-killed-the-manufacturing-cluster