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companies decelerated, an indication that the cluster was moving into the Exploit-
ive Expansion stage of the life-cycle. However, renewal of the cluster from an
increase and restructuring among the middle sized companies meant that the level
of new companies increased due to increased entrepreneurship and related startups,
and the associated appearance of new and more diverse information. In short, the
cluster today based on the status of network relationships appears to be in the
Exploratory Expansion stage of development.
12.5.3 Entrepreneurship
While there is a strong and deep value chain around each of the major
chaebols
this
supply chain has mostly arisen around
chaebol
incentivized start-ups (spinoffs),
selected companies and/or subsidiaries. Grass roots company formation and devel-
opment into ventures that later find their way into the supply chain of one of the
three conglomerates is not the primary way entrepreneurship seems to work in
Korea. This is due largely to the prevailing
chaebol
dominated industry structure
and policy. However, major entrepreneurial behavior at a high level was observed
in the late 1990s that led to major changes in the previous shipbuilding industrial
structure. New or transformed older companies at the mid-size level emerged and
brought new and more efficient enterprises into being such as the STX Group (Shin
and Hassink
2011
). This led to creation of new best practices and increased scale
and scope of the cluster. Nonetheless,
chaebol
dominated structure appears to have
constrained the development of entrepreneurship in terms of the emergence of
independent growth companies and thus while the Korean shipbuilding cluster
has grown considerably it has not been associated with the pattern of entrepreneur-
ship that theory suggests at the Take-off, Exploratory or Exploitive stages. This is
despite the fact that one of the key motivating factors of entrepreneurship is
heterogeneity of information and knowledge which as noted below follows the
trajectory indicated by the life-cycle model. Given the constrained level of entre-
preneurship while preconditions for its expansion existed, a qualification of how
this dimension of cluster dynamics evolves may be needed in future study.
Like the competitiveness dimension, entry and exit behavior of firms was
slowing in the middle and late 1990s. The renewal of the cluster at the end of the
1990s motivated a reversal in the entry and exit declining trend. As the cluster
moved into the 2000s, entries and exits once again increased signifying that the
cluster was mostly in the Exploratory Expansion stage of the cycle.
12.5.4 Geographic/Spatial Concentration
Company concentration was high in the pre-cluster and early cluster stages and was
primarily centered in the southeastern part of Korea. As the cluster grew in the
Exploratory Expansion era (1980s and 1990s) the cluster remained geographically
concentrated in this part of Korea with the exceptions that some high level inputs
