The strategic factors shaping competitiveness for maritime clusters

Maritime clusters provide an attractive analytical base within a strategic management perspective, as they render a sanctuary for a plethora of strategic factors that sustain competitiveness. This fact is a direct corollary of the investigative potential that generic industrial clusters have provided for decades. Through the critical review of this body of knowledge, a venture to extract the strategic factors that instigate the effects leading to competitiveness is attempted. The objective of this work is to provide a topology of strategic factors concerning the rudiments of competitiveness within maritime clusters, their critical linkages with factors concerning other industrial clusters and their differentiation, if any. For this end, literature concerned with industrial clusters is reviewed in order to extract the underlying factors that compose the distinct manifestation of competitiveness within them and these factors are categorized as per their nature. This work aspires to provide a relevant understanding of the factors dictating the competitiveness of clusters in the maritime sector; its results contribute to the body of knowledge concerning maritime clusters, for they provide a readily available critical review of the elements that formulate competitiveness within these particular industrial entities.