B2C—bubble to cluster: the dot-com boom, spin-off entrepreneurship, and regional agglomeration

This article studies entrepreneurial activities emerging out of one of Germany’s most prominent dot-com firms, Intershop, a maker of e-commerce software. We show that Intershop spawned about 40 new ventures. Most spin-offs entered locally, giving rise to a small but growing software cluster and counteracting the job losses that accompanied the parent firm’s drastic downsizing after 2000. We trace the knowledge transfer from Intershop to the spin-offs and relate it to recent theorizing on the spin-off process as well as spin-off-based cluster formation. The Intershop case suggests that temporarily successful dot-coms could exert lasting effects on regional development.