It is commonly accepted nowadays that innovations are brought forward in an interactive process of knowledge generation and application. The business sector, the science sector, and policy actors are involved in this process as has been stressed in concepts such as innovation systems and the network approach. It is still unclear, however, as to what extent different kinds of innovation rely on specific knowledge sources and links. More advanced innovations on the one hand might draw more on scientific knowledge, generated in universities and research organizations. Such knowledge is often exchanged in personal interactions at a local or regional level. Incremental innovations and the adoption of new technologies, on the other hand, seem to occur often in interaction with partners from the business sector also at higher spatial levels. In this paper we analyze such patterns of knowledge links. After dealing with knowledge interactions from a conceptual view and reviewing the relevant literature, we present an empirical analysis for Austria. The findings show that firms introducing more advanced innovations are relying to a higher extent on R&D and patents, and that they are cooperating more often with universities and research organizations. Firms having introduced less advanced innovations rely more on knowledge links with business services. Furthermore, the employment of researchers was identified as a key factor enhancing knowledge interactions of firms with universities.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may Abstract:Applying recent theoretical concepts of social systems to innovation networks of firms leads to the presumption that linking firms to non-business systems stimulates innovativeness more than remaining within the business system's set of routines.Crossing the border to science, in particular, increases the diversity of firms' innovation partners and respective innovation stimuli which, in turn, improves the capability of firms to introduce more advanced innovations. This contention is supported by a statistical analysis using data from a research project on innovation systems in several European regions. The results demonstrate that partners from science are more important than the firms' customers for the introduction of products which are new to the market.2

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SMEs innovate in a different way to larger firms. They command fewer resources, have less R&D, and they generally face more uncertainties and barriers to innovation. These weaknesses could partly be overcome by their integration into networks and innovation systems. Due to the fact that interactions of SMEs are often informal and trust based, the region should be an important interaction and support-space for the innovation activities of SMEs. According to the empirical findings of a European TSER project (SMEPOL) this was not fully confirmed: SMEs are less often engaged in innovation networks than larger firms and if they have innovation partnerships they are primarily concentrated on business partners. Because relations to science and technology transfer are rare, SMEs make only limited use of the full potential of their respective regional innovation systems.