Clusters and SMEs: An opportunity to be taken: Algerian Experience

Companies face a strong competitiveness that characterizes the economic environment; however, the shape of this competitiveness has been changed due to many factors to shift from pure competitiveness, where each company works in isolation for its own benefits, to a new sort of competitiveness under a kind of cooperation between many companies and other economic actors, sharing local resources, using similar technologies, abecause they need to be near from the required financial and human resources, as well as the innovation resources, for obtaining the raw materials in high quality and low prices, meanwhile to find near markets to distribute their outputs. This can be only if they work in a region that contains all that through clustering and networking. These linkages and alliances may be between big companies from both private and public sector, as well as small businesses that have been extended worldwide in an accelerated pace. This new type of companies “SMEs” with their specific characteristics need, such kind of cooperation to face the strong competitiveness and to benefit from the external economies, then to maintain a significant market part. In this context Algerian authorities work to implement effecient strategies to encourage clusters in the interest of SMEs in many fields. This paper is divided into three parts; the first one aims to give a theoretical base about the notion of “clusters”, the advantages of clusters, types of clusters, and the second part is about SMEs and how can they get benefits from clustering. The last part discusses the Algerian experience in adopting clusters strategies.