Organizations are complex social systems that are not easy to understand, yet they must be managed if a company is to succeed. This book explains networks and how managers and organizations can navigate them to produce successful strategic innovation outcomes. Although managers are increasingly aware of the importance of social relations for the inner-workings of the organization, they often lack insights and tools to analyze, influence or even create these networks. This book draws on insights from social network theory; insights sharpened by research in a number of different empirical settings including production, engineering, financial services, consulting, food processing, and R&D/hi-tech organizations and alternates between offering critical real business examples and more rigorous analysis. This concise book is vital reading for students of business and management as well as managers and executives.

Innovation networks are a major source for acquiring new information and knowledge and thus for supporting innovation processes. Despite the many theoretical and empirical contributions to the explanation of networks, many questions still remain open. For example: How can networks, if they do not emerge by their own, be initiated? How can fragmentation in innovation systems be overcome? And how can networking experience from market economies be transferred to the emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe? By presenting a selection of papers which address innovation networking from theoretical and political viewpoints, the book aims at giving answers to these questions.

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.

Examining the role of the much-vaunted concepts of regional clusters in the prosperity and economic expansion of countries, this work looks at the different experiences of industrial districts and high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley, Boston's biotech region, and Hsinchu-Taipei.

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.

This book integrates history of science and technology with modern social network theory. Using examples from the history of machines, as well as case studies from wireless, radio and chaos theory, the author challenges the genius model of invention. Network analysis concepts are presented to demonstrate the societal nature of invention in areas such as steam power, internal combustion engines, early aviation, air conditioning and more. Using modern measures of network theory, the author demonstrates that the social networks of invention from the 19th and early 20th centuries have similar characteristics to modern 21st C networks such as the World Wide Web. The book provides evidence that exponential growth in technical innovation is linked to the growth of historical innovation networks.

This book examines the different normative approaches politicians, bureaucrats and community actors use to frame the innovation puzzle, arguing that these create specific cultures of innovation. The authors explore the role of formal institutions and informal networks in promoting and impeding governmental innovation.