Economic competitiveness through cluster integration: The development of innovation capabilities in the mexican software industry

Different studies relate innovation with the economic dynamism of localities, regions and countries, but developing innovative capabilities is not a quick or easy process. Innovative companies must learn to cooperate with others in order to maintain their leadership and to share the costs and risks involved. Even so, alliances, networks and clusters also enhance competitiveness by accelerating the learning processes involved. The purpose of this work is to describe the early development stages of a software cluster in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area, the second largest city in Mexico and the first one in terms of investment in the software industry. It is the first phase of a longitudinal study which seeks to understand the factors and processes involved in developing collective innovation capabilities. We document the early stages of inter-organizational collaboration and learning, and the development of innovative capabilities that derives from these interactions, presenting data from a survey applied to 52 software companies and open ended interviews with central actors in the nascent cluster. The paper shows some of the ways in which development of systemic innovation capabilities is linked to factors such as cooperation networks, adequate institutional arrangements, venture capital availability, information flows and spillovers, and inter organizational learning.