In this manuscript, we do not intend to demonstrate direct performance effect of cluster conditions, cluster policy, and cluster management. This is beyond the scope of our paper. It would be an important research topic to challenge the “technocratic faith”, but we cut the discussion about the factors of cluster performance from the text and Figure 1 in order to avoid any misunderstanding. Instead, we added a detailed discussion about “initial conditions” (now “basic conditions”) of clusters in Section 2.2 and 3.1 (a new section).
This reformulation is incorrect as the Koschatzky (2000) paper pre-dated the BioValley initiative and does not look at INTERREG either.