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The notion of creative clusters has become the focus of a growing number of policy initiatives aimed at revitalizing economies by means of creativity. However, despite their prominence in policy discourse, creative clusters are still a 'fuzzy' concept, defined and treated differently in different strands of research. To address these disparities, this paper presents a systematic literature review of creative cluster research (CCR), with the aim of: (1) exploring the state of the art in the field, (2) pointing out some important limitations, and (3) outlining a future research agenda. A total of 355 articles published between 1986 and 2019 were analysed, drawing upon a combination of manual coding, bibliometric analysis, and text mining techniques. This multi-method approach allowed us to provide both a meta-analysis of CCR and an exploration of its thematic content. In so doing, our paper contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how creative clusters have been studied over time, both broadly and in relation to different creative sectors and geographical contexts. Moreover, through the identification of research gaps and boundaries of knowledge in the field, it points to key methodological and conceptual development issues to be addressed in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision makers considering policy or strategy related to the development of emerging technologies expect high quality data on the support for different technological options in order to track trends and allocate resources. A natural starting point would be R&D funding statistics. This paper explores the limitations of such aggregated data in relation to the substance and quantification of funding for emerging technologies. Using biotechnology as an illustrative case, we test the utility of a novel taxonomy to demonstrate the endemic weaknesses in the availability and quality of data from public and private sources. Using the same taxonomy, we consider the extent to which tech-mining presents an alternative, or potentially complementary, way to determine support for emerging technologies using proxy measures such as patents and scientific publications. We find that using proxy measures provides additional visibility of technological emergence and suggest these are a useful complement to financial data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]