Some caveats are in order. First, this assumes an informed and objective private sector representing broad interests forwarding economic growth. Reality is more complicated. First, firms and industries often do not know what they do not know. Bloom and Van Reenen’s (2010) surveys of LDC firm management suggest weak managerial practices and poor diagnostics of their own firms, let alone sectoral shortcomings and needs. A variety of policies have emerged to improve the dynamism of existing clusters, identify bottlenecks and generate a coherent plan. Managerial extension services, professional cluster analysis are used to facilitate benchmarking and develop a vision of sectoral needs. “Roadmapping”—a technique developed by the business community in the 1980s—which can plan the key steps to arrive at, and execute, a shared vision of an organization’s future goals has proven useful in this regard (Kappel, 2001; Willyard and McClees, 1997). It has been used by industrial consortia, research institutes and governments for supporting sector-level foresight initiatives (Kostoff, 2001; McCarthy, 2003). In the case of “big-push” style cluster initiatives, it can be used by government as “light-touch”/ “exploratory” industrial policy—explore all future possibilities and barriers through discussions with relevant stakeholders, structure the vast amount of information to arrive at an overview of alternatives that are desirable and feasible, and then identify (and effectively communicate) the priority investment decision (Groenveld, 1997; Garcia 1997; Rinne, 2004).<sup>20</sup> Overall, the idea that the government can provide an informational public good directly rests critically on its capacity to collect or generate frontier information and stay up to date and hence the design of diffusion agencies is critical.<sup>21</sup> Second, chambers of commerce, industry associations and labor groups may not be prevalent and developed enough to distill quality information in a representative way for communication to government. In particular, SMEs are often not represented in the large industrial associations most prevalent in emerging countries. In many countries, networks of banks, chambers and government functionaries facilitate the identification of problems, as well as potential high growth firms. Hence, cultivating inclusive networks may be considered a policy end in itself.

> 20 Chile contracted the services of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to identify “desirable” sectors through a forwardlooking market intelligence exercise, and to determine whether or not the country has the required capabilities to produce a product competitively and, if not, how easy it would be to acquire them.

> 21 Chang (2009) argues that state marketing help can be crucial, especially for smaller exporters, as exemplified by the cases of JETRO and KOTRA – respectively, the state trading agency of Japan and Korea. In contrast, Braguinsky & Hounshell (2015) note that the Japanese government’s technological transfer engineer entrusted with upgrading the flagship textile sector at the turn of the century gave inappropriate and dated advice leading to those receiving the government advice performing significantly worse than those not using government services.

20