Technology Clusters Article

Technology Clusters and Their Role in the
Commercialisation of Micro and Nano Systems
In my annual MEMS Commercialization Report Card which was presented at the MM/MEMS/Nano Live USA 2012, I presented 14 critical success factors for MEMS commercialisation [1]. One of these factors was MEMS cluster development. Since I began tracking this topic starting with the 2003 Report Card, which was facilitated as a result of a strategic marketing research study that I conducted on technology clusters for the State of Michigan’s Economic Development Corporation, the grades have varied between C+to B+ with the 2011 grade being C (Figure 1). I believe that these mediocre grades provided by the market research participants have recently existed due to the lack of newly formed clusters in the past couple of years and not based on the continuing level of support of existing clusters.

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MEMS Technology Review_Clusters_April 2012_FINAL PDF