Business incubators are considered important contributors to innovation, as they foster and support entrepreneurship. Incubators, nurturing creative start-ups, may also function as ancillary activities in spatially concentrated creative clusters. Furthermore, an incubator itself may even function as, or be the centre of a cluster. Such incubators may actively encourage start-up entrepreneurs to cooperate, thus creating a cluster-like project ecology. This chapter provides researchers and policymakers with a framework of the potential roles of incubators in the development of creative clusters. These can be found mainly in four areas. First, incubators may provide hard infrastructure or enable the use of hard infrastructure such as old, derelict buildings, hence avoiding waste of useful spaces. Second, incubators may act as mediator between incubatees and the primary and secondary activities in the cluster. Third, incubators can contribute to a soft infrastructure containing factors such as liveliness, image, buzz and social networks, which may increase the performance of creative clusters. Finally, incubators contribute to the agglomeration economies that are considered crucial for geographical concentration, by constituting a more diverse labour pool and by fostering cooperation and coordination of activities and other spillovers between firms.@en

Clusters of cultural and creative industries are rather widespread in and surrounding inner cities. The development and dynamics of these clusters are objects of study of various conceptual approaches: some aim at their role and significance for urban development, others at their development and dynamics as such. These latter approaches focus primarily on producers or consumers of cultural or creative goods. By contrast, this paper explores the role of a particular type of secondary or ancillary activity - the business incubator - in the development of these clusters. The paper is explorative and draws no explicit conclusions. Nevertheless, the incubator appears to be an ancillary activity that contributes in various manners to sustainable cluster development, i.e. not only by their output of young, trained entrepreneurs in possession of up-to-date knowledge and skills, but also by means of, for instance, their buildings and social networks.

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Amsterdam and Rotterdam have followed rather different trajectories after 1970 when deindustrialisation set in. Amsterdam benefited strongly from the growth in financial services, creative and cultural industries (CCIs) and tourism after 1990. Moreover, it has been quite successful in attracting highly skilled workers. Rotterdam, meanwhile, has fared less well. This has also become apparent after 2008, when employment growth in Amsterdam bounced back while that in Rotterdam stagnated. The Amsterdam economy, in other words, appears to be more resilient than that of Rotterdam. Resilience is a complex concept and many potential explanations are on offer. In this paper, we focus on the role of the sectoral composition in explaining the divergent growth paths of Amsterdam and Rotterdam using a shift-share analysis of employment data over the period 2000-2014 as a strategic window. This is a first explorative step to a more comprehensive understanding of these cities’ growth paths.@en