Network Models of Innovation Process and Policy Implications

SPRU Electronic Working Paper Series, 2004

We analyse the changing contribution of networks to the innovative performance of 30 pharmaceutical companies from 1989 to 1997. Count data models show that collaborations with universities and biotechnology companies are important determinants of the firms' innovative performance, but their respective contributions diverge when industry matures. Larger firms enjoy a significant size advantage and inhouse research activities are highly significant. Returns to scale in research are decreasing over time while the size advantage is increasing. The changing contribution of networks to knowledge production suggests that these are phase-specific, which has substantial managerial and policy implications.

Handbook on Complexity and Public Policy, 2015

Greater understanding of what factors promote the formation of innovation networks and their successful performance would help policymakers improve the design of policy interventions aimed at funding R&D projects to be carried out by networks of innovators. In this paper, we focus on the organizations that can play the role of network intermediaries, facilitating the involvement of other participants and promoting communication and knowledge flows. Based on an original empirical dataset of organizations involved in five publicly-funded policy programmes in support of innovation networks, we identify different types of intermediaries based on an analysis of their positions within networks of relationships. We observe that agents that occupy broker positions-linking agents that are not connected to each other-are more likely to be found in technologically turbulent environments, while the agents that occupy intercohesive positions-bridging cohesive communities of network agents-operate in more stable contexts. Intermediaries in general are more likely to be local associations and governments. However, besides this, it is not possible to clearly identify types of organizations that are more likely to be either brokers or intercohesive agents: different innovation networks may require different organizations to mediate relationships between the other participants.

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2008

European Journal of Innovation Management, 2002

Innovation networks have become a persistent organisational phenomenon in industrial innovation processes. However, in economics they were considered in the first place only as a temporary phenomenon between markets and a hierarchical organisation within a single firm. The main focus of traditional neo-classical analysis simply was on cost reduction of R&D within a network. Only with the coming up of evolutionary economics with its prevailing knowledge orientation also learning and synergistic partnering move in the centre of interest. Without a consideration of the roles true uncertainty, heterogeneity as well as the historical character of time play in innovation, networks cannot be explained as a selforganisational persistent phenomenon. The present paper wants to bring together different strands of the new theory of innovation and develop an evolutionary theory of innovation networks.

siecon.org

We explore how the implementation of a set of policy programmes over a period of six years induced some "emergent" learning effects which had not originally been envisaged by policymakers. This way, we show how policy evaluation can be used not only to assess the expected impact of policy interventions but also to discover their unexpected behavioural effects, and therefore provides an important instrument to guide the design of future interventions.

2012

This paper focuses on the role of inter-industrial structures and the position of economic sectors in them for the diffusion of knowledge and innovation. Network Theory and Social Network Analysis have been applied to analyze the structure of the Spanish Input-output system and its evolution over a thirty-five-year period. The structural analysis conducted tests the existence of a Scale-free topology and also includes the identification of sectors acting as hubs or super-spreaders, which make up the core of the system. Scale-free networks correspond to structures that allow for faster and more efficient diffusion processes that are enhanced when initiated in hubs. As a concluding remark, this paper puts forward a proposal for interventions to attain a higher incidence in the national innovative capacity and in the development process.

… Congress of the …, 2002

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that knowledge and learning are the core of competitiveness, international division of labour and agglomeration and exclusion phenomena. Yet we are still in need of a better understanding of the processes which allow access by individual regions both to codified knowledge and RTD networks as well as tacit knowledge and know-how at the international/interregional level. This paper will discuss possible approaches to analyze the mechanisms which operate at the international/interregional level and lead to higher forms of integration of industrial and service firms, not only in a commercial or financial perspective but also in knowledge and innovation networks. It will point to a need to develop policy strategies in support of institutions that create and transfer knowledge on a European scale and outline open questions for the creation of the necessary institutional background for the creation and the support of knowledge and innovation networks at this level and for the conditions of its transferability to Objective 1 regions and the EU candidate countries.

Prometheus, 2015

8

2000

This study focuses on the relationship between industrial clustering and innovation. It contributes to this literature by showing two empirical properties of the cluster learn- ing process: first, that the structure of the knowledge network in a cluster is related with the heterogeneous distribution of firm knowledge bases and, second, that business interactions and knowledge flows are not highly co-occurring