clusters

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clusters

geographically proximate groups of interconnected companies, suppliers, service producers and associated institutions, linked by commodities and complementarities. Michael Porter identified clusters as being vital for competitiveness insofar as they improve productivity and flexibility, aid innovation and contribute to new business formation. Porter noted that national economies tend to specialise in certain industrial clusters and that if these clusters are internationally competitive then their export performance will be good. See COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF COUNTRIES, EXTERNAL ECONOMIES OF SCALE.

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Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe.

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The cluster shivered, as from hooked fore-foot to hooked hind-foot it telegraphed uneasiness.

The spoken word snapped the current through the cluster.

Not by a whole comb," cried the young bee who had broken the cluster.

Some bees tried the new plan for a while, and found it cost eight times more wax than the old six sided specification; and, as they never allowed a cluster to hang up and make wax in peace, real wax was scarce.

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And, above it, the woman of marble, composed and blind on the high pedestal, seemed to ward off the devouring night with a cluster of lights.

And looming vaguely below the woman of marble, livid and still like a patient phantom, held out in the night a cluster of extinguished lights.

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Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him.

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It was a fruitless search, however, in so far as antelope is concerned; but one night as I lay courting sleep at the edge of a little cluster of date-palms that surround an ancient well in the midst of the arid, shifting sands, I suddenly became conscious of a strange sound coming apparently from the earth beneath my head.

Nothing of interest enlivened our journey by rail and caravan till we came to the cluster of date-palms about the ancient well upon the rim of the Sahara.

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It must have been close to three o'clock in the morning that Anderssen brought the boat's nose to the shore before a clearing where could be dimly seen in the waning moonlight a cluster of native huts encircled by a thorn boma.

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He had ornamented his hat with a cluster of peacock's feathers, but they were limp and broken, and now trailed negligently down his back.