Innovation requires cooperation among multiple actors spread across different organizations in order to fund, research, develop, scale-up and bring new products and services to the marketplace. Proximity is often corelated with cooperation, leading to policies adopted around the world to build science and technology parks as a way of stimulating economic development. However, cooperation can falter in the presence of extant collective action problems. The transformation of collocated facilities and expertise into dynamic innovation clusters requires that multiple individual actors recognize the opportunities and synergies that can arise from cooperation, diagnose prevailing collective action problems, and craft the rules needed to solve the myriad challenges to working together. Elaborating the institutional contexts within which linkages across innovation ecosystems can grow and thrive can also broaden the opportunity for economic growth to areas beyond dense technology clusters.