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).
As scholars, the authors should challenge this technocratic faith of policy-makers and practitioners, although evaluation is beyond this paper’s scope. The performance of clusters is also affected by many exogenous influences not captured in the simple model.