A widespread assumption in economic geography and the economics of innovation is that firms located in clusters benefit from territorial learning and knowledge spillovers. However, it remains unclear to what extent these benefits actually occur. This paper aims to address this issue and examines to what extent research and development (R&D) workers in the Cambridge Information Technology (IT) Cluster benefit from being located in the Cluster. The study shows why many do not believe that their work benefits from being located in the Cluster. The results suggest that academics as well as policy makers need to be more careful with the assumption of technological knowledge spillovers in innovative clusters. The significant advantages of the Cambridge IT Cluster seem to be of a different nature; in particular they concern labour market advantages and benefits from the global ‘brand’ of Cambridge.

在经济地理学和创新经济学中，一个普遍的假设是，位于集群中的企业受益于区域学习和知识溢出。然而，目前尚不清楚这些好处实际会在多大程度上产生。本文旨在解决这一问题，并对剑桥信息技术(IT)集群中的研发人员在多大程度上从集群中受益进行了研究。这项研究表明了为什么许多人不认为他们的工作受益于位于集群。研究结果表明，学术界和政策制定者需要对创新集群中技术知识溢出的假设更加谨慎。剑桥IT集群的显著优势似乎具有不同的性质;这些问题尤其涉及劳动力市场的优势以及剑桥这个全球“品牌”带来的好处。