Abstract
For the last few years, the government policy initiatives to overcome impediments to university-industry collaboration and to give a powerful impetus to the commercialization of university's knowledge capitals have been worked out in rapid succession. The most notable examples are MEXT's "Knowledge Cluster" Program and METI's "Industrial Cluster" Program. This paper attempts to answer the following questions : ・What is M.E. Porter's original idea of the cluster approach? ・Why the concept of cluster has been so attractive among policy makers around the world? ・What are common core elements of cluster policies, whose characteristics and content have been interpreted very differently due to the path dependency of these policies? It also examines the background and implementation processes of Japanese cluster programs claiming to shape cluster development.
