Co-development and composite clusters - the secular strength of Nordic telecommunications

During the 1980s and 1990s Finland and Sweden were on the international frontier in telecommunications, pioneering the first-generation cellular system and leading in the development of the second generation. This strength in telecommunications has developed under various regulatory regimes in a complex industrial history; going back to the nineteenth century. To account for this Fenno-Swedish telecom trajectory, the article starts out with Porter's model of industrial competitiveness and theories of public procurement, and then focus the attention and analysis in two directions: (i) the historical role of advanced, research-intensive users and competitive public-private development pairs; and (ii) the emergence and significance of a composite binational clusters and their local agglomerations in the accelerated industry growth in the 1990s.