Communautés de pratique et réseaux sociaux dans la dynamique de fonctionnement des districts industriels. Une étude comparative entre la Silicon Valley et Sophia Antipolis

The development of high tech clusters depends on the spatial proximity of a set of complementary and interdependent competencies, which contribute to entrepreneurship and firms' growth. Relating Granovetter's theory of strong and weak ties to situated learning approaches, this articles contends that the existence of strong ties between members of communities of practice is a condition for the production of scientific, technological, industrial, legal, financial and managerial expertise. In addition, weak ties between communities are the condition for the diffusion of these expertises and for the mutual coordination of actors in highly decentralised systems. Because of systemic interdependencies of communities of practice, the lack of any one expertise weakens the dynamics of the whole cluster.