Clusters and pipelines, commuters and nomads: Business travel in the Irish software industry

This paper uses research on business air travel to analyse the structure and functioning of clusters through a case study of the Irish software industry in Dublin. Whereas most cluster studies have focused on the importance of geographical proximity for knowledge creation within the cluster, the importance of extra-cluster networking has only recently began to receive some attention. Recent work for instance shows that particularly successful clusters are able to build and maintain a variety of “pipelines” with relevant hot-spots around the globe (Bathelt et. al., 2004). However this strand of work tends to “black box” the means whereby such pipelines are created. By using interviews with a sample of software managers and professionals, our paper investigates the particular forms of business travel generated by the software cluster in Dublin. The interviews generated data on both the role of business air travel for individual firms and on the travelling of the most mobile individuals within these firms. At the firm level our findings show that although international travel is crucial for Irish-owned firms, it is more extensive for foreign-owned firms, confirming the lack of structural division between foreign and indigenous firms in the cluster. At the individual level we differentiate between travellers who are commuters, explorers and nomads. Only the commuters travel along clearly defined “pipelines”; the travelling of both explorers and nomads shows how all elements of the cluster have more complex external connections than proposed by most of the cluster research literature.