Proximity and Innovation: From Statics to Dynamics

Abstract

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Towards Urban Resilience through Inter-City Networks of Co-Invention: A Case Study of U.S. Cities

“…Creative firms build and sustain external and internal resources that can develop resilience capacity to minimize the effects of disasters and reduce economic losses [30,33,35]. Balland et al [70] and Huggins and Thompson [102] argued that successful inventors might have better knowledge relationships with local inventors, but also with inventors outside the cluster. Combining local and extra-local competencies and skills to develop an inter-city system is considered a major strategy for cities to mitigate and adapt to climate change and economic recession, which in turn provides a way to build urban resilience [19,20,26,28].…”

“…Knowledge is not simply bounded in a cluster; there are considerable interactions with distant partners. Relevant phrases in the literature such as 'local buzz and global pipelines' [18,67], 'local nodes in global networks' [14,44], 'local sticky and global ubiquitous' [19], and 'local circuit and global circuit' [68] stress integral interfaces between local and extra-local knowledge exchange within and outside clusters, and stimulated studies of network proximity at a much wider range, comprising multiple cities rather than focusing on particular areas only [69,70]. The space of knowledge flows here is regarded as a kind of network-based system where knowledge circulates among economic agents through intra-cluster linkages and inter-city partnerships in different places [11,12].…”

“…Access to external sources of knowledge is required to generate prosperous innovation and invention [14,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77]. Creative firms build and sustain network-based systems where external and internal resources develop resilience capacity, in order to minimize the effects of disasters and reduce economic losses and therefore recover quickly from shocks [30,33,35,76].…”

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“…Other theoretical approaches present similar views, like national-, regional-, or sectorial innovation system theory and triple helix theory (Asheim & Isaksen, 2002;Asheim, Smith & Oughton, 2011;Balland, Boschma & Frenken, 2015;Cooke, 2001;Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000;Freeman, 1993;Leydesdorff, 2012;Lundvall, 2010). Common to all these approaches is the view that innovation is a distributed and interactive process, involving a multitude of actors embedded within dynamic systems that no individual member of the system controls alone.…”

Introduction to the 50th Volume

“…At the heart of this work are enduring questions about the importance of geographical proximity in promoting innovation relative to other, non-spatial forms of proximity (BOUBA-OLGA et al, 2015). The paper by BALLAND et al (2015) seeks to introduce a dynamic perspective into the analysis of these relationships by considering how different forms of proximity interact and become more or less important over time. In the shortterm, being close together tends to foster knowledge sharing between firms.…”