Industrial Innovation Networks And Economic Development

This book offers an innovative examination of how ‘low–technology’ industries operate. Based on extensive fieldwork in India, the book fuses economic and sociological perspectives on information sharing by means of informal interaction in a low-technology cluster in a developing country. In doing so, the book sheds new light on settings where economic relations arise as emergent properties of social relations. This book examines industrial innovation and microeconomic network behaviour among producers and clusters, perceiving knowledge diffusion to be a socially-spatial, as much as a geographically spatial, phenomenon. This is achieved by employing two methods – simulation modelling, and (quantitative, qualitative, and historical) social network analysis. The simulation model, based on its findings, motivates two empirical studies – one descriptive case and one network study – of low-tech rural and semi-urban traditional technology clusters in Kerala state in southern India. These cases demonstrate two contrasting stories of how social cohesion either supports or thwarts informal information sharing and learning. This book pushes towards an economic-sociology approach to understanding knowledge diffusion and technological learning, which perceives innovation and learning as being more social processes than the mainstream view perceives them to be. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to the literature on defensive innovation and the role of networks in technological innovation and knowledge diffusion, as well as to policy studies of Indian small firm and traditional technology clusters.

This book brings together original research on the role of networks in regional economic development and innovation. It presents a comprehensive framework synthesizing extant theories, a palette of real-world cases in the aerospace, automotive, life science, biotechnology and health care industries, and fundamental agent-based computer models elucidating the relation between regional development and network dynamics. The book is primarily intended for researchers in the fields of innovation economics and evolutionary economic geography, and particularly those interested in using agent-based models and empirical case studies. However, it also targets (regional) innovation policy makers who are not only interested in policy recommendations, but also want to understand the state-of-the-art agent-based modeling methods used to experimentally arrive at said recommendations.

In Economics, networks are increasingly used to describe the many links created between independent companies, as well as between them and other institutions (universities, banks, venture capital, etc.). In the current global and knowledge-based economy, they can be characterised as knowledge factories and knowledge boosters. They feed the internal processes of innovation (collaborative innovation) or the external processes of innovation, created by the propagation effects that come from inter-firm collaboration. The book explains how innovation networks are at the origin of the production of new knowledge that will be transformed and used in common as well as in separated production processes. This characteristic of networks as knowledge factories gives incentives to further investment in the production of knowledge and ensures the cumulativeness of the innovation process. Some of the authors clearly take a territorial point of view and study how clusters (in different parts of the world: Europe, Eastern Asia and North America) propelled by the quality of the innovation networks they enclose, can be characterised as knowledge pools into which the local actors will be able to draw to reinforce their individual and collective competitiveness. This book also includes analyses of the quality of the networks built within clusters, which may help their identification.

The social dynamics of innovation networks captures the important role of trust, social capital, institutions and norms and values in the creation of knowledge in innovation networks. In doing so, this book connects to a long-standing debate on the socio-spatial context of innovation in economic geography, which is usually referred to as the Territorial Models of Innovation (TIMs) literature. This present volume breaks with the TIM literature in several important ways. In the first place, this book emphasizes the role of individual agency because individuals and their networks are increasingly recognized as the principal agents of knowledge creation. Secondly, this volume looks at space as a continuous field of opportunity rather than as bounded territory with a set of endowments, such as knowledge base and social capital. Although individually these elements are not new to the TIM literature, it has thus far failed to grasp their critical implication for studying the social dynamics of innovation networks. The approach to the socio-spatial context of innovation in this volume is summarized as Knowledge Economy 2.0. It emphasizes that human creativity is now the main source of economic value and that human creativity and knowledge creation is not an organized process within organizations, but happens bottom up in formal and informal professional and social networks of individuals that cut across multiple organizations.

Collaborative innovation networks are cyberteams of motivated individuals, and are self-organizing emergent social systems with the potential to promote health, happiness and individual growth in real-world work settings. This book describes how to identify and nurture collaborative innovation networks in order to shape the future working environment and pave the way for health and happiness, and how to develop future technologies to promote economic development, social innovation and entrepreneurship. The expert contributions and case studies presented also offer insights into how large corporations can creatively generate solutions to real-world problems by means of self-organizing mechanisms, while simultaneously promoting the well-being of individual workers. The book also discusses how such networks can benefit startups, offering new self-organizing forms of leadership in which all stakeholders are encouraged to collaborate in the development of new products.

Innovation is increasingly recognised as the key to successful competition in the global knowledge-based economy. In Knowledge, Clusters and Regional Innovation the authors illuminate the highly differentiated nature of the innovation systems found across the country and demonstrate that innovation can occur in a wide range of sectors and clusters, ranging from multimedia and biotechnology in large metropolitan areas to more traditional sectors such as wood products in rural settings.Written by members of the Innovation Systems Research Network (ISRN), a cross-national network of regionally oriented researchers from a wide range of disciplines, Knowledge, Clusters and Regional Innovation provides important insights into the varied nature of innovation in the Canadian economy. The members of the network have recently launched a major study of cluster development across Canada that promises to provide scholars and policymakers with continuing insights into the nature economic development in Canada.Contributors include Neil Bradford (Huron University College), Shauna Brail (Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, Ontario), John N.H. Britton (University of Toronto), Michael Gurstein (Technical University of British Columbia), J. Adam Holbrook, Cooper H. Langford (University of Calgary), Lisa Mills (Brown University), Jorge Niosi (Université du Québec à Montréal), Pierre Therrien (Marketplace Innovation Directorate, Industry Canada), Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay (Université du Québec), and David A. Wolfe.

This book discusses the influence of technological and institutional change on development and growth, the impact on innovation of labor markets, the spatial distribution of innovation dynamics, and the meaning of knowledge generation and knowledge diffusion processes for development policies. The individual articles demonstrate the powerful possibilities that emerge from the toolkit of evolutionary and Schumpeterian economics. The book shows that evolutionary economics can be applied to the multi-facetted phenomena of economic development, and that a strong orientation on knowledge and innovation is key to development, especially in less developed and emerging economies.

The relationship between innovation, networks and localities is of central concern for many nations. However, despite increasing interest in the components of this research triangle, efforts in these fields are hampered by a lackofconceptual and empirical insights. This volume brings together contributions from a distinguished group of scholars working in different but related disciplines, and aims to provide a fresh look at this research triangle. The objective is to offer a concise overview of current developments and insights derived from recent studies in Europe and North America. All of the contributions are based on original research undertaken in the various regions and nations and are published here for the first time. We are grateful to all those who have contributed to this volume for their willingness to participate in the project. Without their co-operation this book would not have been possible. We should like, in addition, to thank Angela Spence for her careful linguistic editing and assistance in co-ordinating the production of the camera ready copy. Lastly, but not least, we wish to express our gratitude for support from our home institutions, and in particular the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Urban and Regional Research), the Austrian Ministry for Science and Transport, the Styrian Government (Section for Science and Research) and the Federation of Austrian Industry in Styria for the financial backing received. April 1999 Manfred M.