Abstract:

According to the preliminary report issued in 2012 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, the number of small and medium-sized companies and small businesses has been on the decline for a long period of time since 1986. The current aggregation results confirmed that the number decreased by 350,000 to 3.85 million in 2012 from 4.2 million in 2009. Considering these circumstances, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has put forth great effort to assist small and medium-sized companies in order to stop the decline and increase the number of such companies. One of the measures taken for this effort is industry-university cooperation. Recently, industrial clusters have attracted much attention by creating new industries. The purpose of this study is to present new perspectives on the theory of industrial clusters from cases where universities play central roles in order to produce new information industries within industrial clusters where the focus is placed on manufacturing in local regions. In order to develop new information industries in industrial clusters, it is required to establish community networks while fostering engineers that are tailored to the features of each local region. In this study we considered the conditions and methods by which universities, as an educational institution, can play key roles.

Keywords:

Industrial Cluster Theory, Network, Consortium, Tacit Knowledge, Technology Transfer.