Spin-offand clustering: a return to the Marshallian district

The present paper investigates the emergence and evolution of an Italian industrial district, the Sassuolo tile district, one of the largest and most successful ceramic districts in the world and a paradigmatic example of an Italian Marshallian district. Overall, our findings confirm that organisational reproduction and heredity represent primary mechanisms of clustering. However our results also show that spin-offs do not perform better than non-spin-offs. It appears that, in dense industrial environments and social networks, competitive advantages can also be acquired or built through other channels.