* We recognized that we did not concretely explain the initial (we changed the term to “basic” in the revision) conditions of clusters in the previous version. Moreover, we recognize that it is important to discuss in detail how these countries differ regarding basic conditions and why the national cluster policies differ across them. Therefore, we fundamentally changed the structure of our manuscript and set up a new Section 3.1 to discuss these issues in detail. Here, we cited the suggested book chapter and paper, but mainly used statistical evidence from OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard on (different) innovation systems to characterize basic conditions of clusters and to distinguish between private- and public-driven clusters. We summarized the discussion in Table 1 (new).
A conceptual and/or theoretical perspective is needed to shed light at the differences found. in terms of the role of the state versus private initiative, governance traditions and philosophies, centralist vs. federal set-up. The authors should include a discussion on how these countries differ e.g.