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This working paper reports the initial results from a project to characterize regional clusters. Despite of, or perhaps because of, the growth in interest and literature on regional clusters, there has been a tendency to group several phenomena under the term." Regional clustering" has been used to describe industrial districts of small crafts firms, high technology centers, agglomerations of financial and business service firms in cities, company towns, and large branch plants and their supply chains. While there are certain similarities among the different types of regional clusters, the unfortunately imprecise terminology has resulted in confusion and a tendency for knowledge about clusters to fail to cumulate." Cluster" terminology seems so embedded that one despairs of redefining or sharply defining the term. However, it can be made far more useful by identifying empirically the families of clusters that exist. There have been some attempts to categorize regional clusters, 1 but these have been done by creating ad hoc typologies with little in the way of empirical investigation of their relative importance.

Two other areas of interest are the roles played by public policy and by specialized clusterbased organizations in cluster development. There have been a number of works that describe specific policies toward regional clustering in particular places, but relatively little that attempts to identify the prevalence of specific types of policy initiatives. 2 The result is that it is difficult or impossible to know which sets of policies are commonly used and which appear to be successful. In addition, several authors have written about cluster-based organizations, but there …