Nowadays, the lowering of global trade barriers and the accelerated development of new technologies, among other factors, have increased the dynamism and uncertainty of the business environment. As a result, organizations must make constant efforts to maintain or increase their market share. In this context, knowledge has positioned itself as the main factor in the competitiveness of companies. Thus, those elements that favor its creation and dissemination can be fundamental for organizations in the exercise of their activity. In this respect, it is worth highlighting the role that business location in specialized environments can play in the access and creation of valuable new knowledge and its effective application to the development of innovations. In recent decades, research on industrial agglomeration developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Alfred Marshall has been revived. Although it was expected that globalization and technological advances, especially in communication and logistics, would reduce the importance of localization in business competitiveness, the reality seems to show the opposite effect: localization has positioned itself as an important factor of competitiveness. However, although the location of companies in this type of environments can favor the access and creation of new specialized knowledge, its effective use and application for the development of innovations will depend, to a large extent, on the internal characteristics of the companies, particularly their capacity to absorb this knowledge and integrate it into their own internal processes. The main objective of this work is to identify the main factors that favor the creation of new knowledge and its effective diffusion and exploitation in the context of a cluster. Particularly, attention has been focused on two main sources: cluster membership and absorptive capacity. In relation to the research methodology, a search equation has been introduced in the "Web of Science" database. Once the results were obtained, they were ordered by number of citations and, subsequently, the 30 most relevant papers were selected. After a detailed analysis of each one of them, and pooling the results, it was concluded that there are a series of relevant factors that influence the degree to which companies effectively take advantage of the knowledge coming from their environment, as well as their capacity to create new knowledge. Furthermore, a certain consensus has been observed in establishing knowledge as an important factor influencing the innovative performance of companies, as well as the socioeconomic development of the regions in which they are located.
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