Dynamism of local and regional economic vocation by the clusters structure has been widely recognized as an acceleration factor that has great impact in the process of economic development of Rio de Janeiro State. The interest for such industrial configuration especially among small enterprises has been increasing sharply and becoming one of the leading research subjects for both public and private institutions. Such new configuration involving small enterprises geographically concentrated around economic activities emerged as a result of the vertical disintegration process after the Second World War, becoming a powerful tool applied to local development, and thus contributing in part for employment generation and life quality. The present study aimed to measure the contribution of industrial clusters for local development in Rio de Janeiro State. To perform it two widely recognized methodologies to assess industrial clusters were combined to generate a new approach applied to characterize the research subject. The results showed that from a universe of 6.640 potential clusters along three base-years (1999-2004-2009), 165 had shown reduced or elevated importance at least in one of the studied years and 29 had shown increased contribution for local development been nominated in this work as industrial clusters with positive experience.