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.

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.

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.

This volume covers the topic of innovation in three sections, first demonstrating that processes of innovation and technological change are spatially differentiated, second examining the increasing importance of knowledge creation and diffusion, and third raising key issues related to the systems of innovation approach as a conceptual framwork for regional innovation analysis. Includes enlightening conceptual and empirical work on the issue of how knowledge spills over locally.

Through successive industrial revolutions, the geography of innovation around the globe has changed radically, and with it the geography of wealth creation and prosperity. Since the Third Industrial Revolution, high incomes are increasingly metropolitan, leading to a renewal of inter-regional divergence within countries. These metropolitan areas are also hotbeds of innovation. At the same time, global networks for the production and delivery of goods and services have expanded greatly in recent decades. The globalization of production is mirrored in the globalization of innovation. This paper argues that the emerging geography of innovation can be characterized as a globalized hub-to-hub system, rather than a geography of overall spread of innovation. Although much attention has been given to explaining the rise and growth of innovation clusters, there is as yet no unified framework for the micro-foundations of the agglomeration and dispersion of innovation. In addition, there appear to be strong links between growing geographical inequality of innovation and prosperity, particularly within countries. This is particularly relevant in the context of declining overall research productivity, which could be driving growing geographical concentration. All in all, there is a rich agenda for continuing to investigate the relationship between the geography of innovation, economic development and income distribution.

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.