Clustering and participating to a (territorial or global) value chain are increasingly considered as major strategies to enhance firms’ competitiveness and sustainability. Both cluster and value chain approaches emphasize the role of cluster governance in fostering innovation, upgrading and sustainability as en essential complement to transaction costs and incidental synergies arising from agglomeration. Nevertheless, recent contributions have stressed that more attention needs to be paid to the concrete governance practices that facilitate the emergence of a specific institutional environment conducive to enhanced collaboration for innovation and upgrading. In this study, we contribute to this debate developing an integrative framework of 8 sets of institutional practices of innovation grouped around three main levers – political, normative and cognitive. Based on a comparative case study of three French clusters of innovation – one technopole and two recent competitiveness clusters – we find that 1) each cluster governances activates all institutional levers and practices but with a high variation of intensity, and that 2) these variations of intensity match the upgrading at the cluster level. Moreover, the implementation of the political, normative and cognitive levers leads to the emergence of three new variables, namely the cluster’s legitimacy, the institutional trust and the architectural knowledge, that favor the building of a sustainable territorial value chain.
