Related to what? Reviewing the literature on technological relatedness: Where we are now and where can we go?

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to critically review contemporary insights derived from studies that focus on relatedness. A well-established body of literature has identified three approaches for measuring relatedness, those based on co-occurrence matrices, industrial hierarchy and resource similarity. From these measures, several authors have begun developing relational networks to capture the branching capabilities of products, industries, technologies and skills. Thereafter the present contribution then shifts from analysing 'what is' and begins considering what 'could be'? It argues that the concept of relatedness lies at the heart of deconstructing issues of unrelated diversification and smart specialisation.

Operationalizing the knowledge space: theory, methods and insights for Smart Specialisation

“…Finally, we project our findings onto the recently proposed Smart Specialisation strategy that has come to underscore regional competitiveness throughout Europe (Balland, Boschma, Crespo, & Rigby, 2019). The results corroborate the expanding corpus of literature that advocates that regions should strengthen their technological portfolio by adopting those technologies proximate to their existing knowledge base, whilst abandoning those on the periphery (Whittle & Kogler, 2019).…”

“…Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabasi, and Hausmann (2007) first formalized these branching capabilities for countries when they developed the product space, a network linking products that are exported in tandem. Since then, these general principles have been adapted by a series of researchers to demonstrate how regions/technologies/industries/countries branch out into activities that are cognitively proximate to their current specialization (Whittle & Kogler, 2019). As it explicitly relates to the current investigation, Kogler et al (2013), Boschma et al (2015), Rigby (2015), Kogler and Whittle (2018), Apa et al (2018) and Balland et al (2019) each demonstrate how regional knowledge spaces contain a wealth of information on both the opportunities for likely future diversification and also on the innovative capacity of that region.…”

“…The knowledge space is an intuitive way to model the processes of technological specialization/diversification of a regional economy. Grounded in a path-dependent logic, it argues that technological change is strongly biased towards related activities, whereby regions are more likely to adopt technologies that are related to their existing technological portfolio (Whittle & Kogler, 2019). The knowledge space is generated using information on the cooccurrence of technology classes listed on patent documents.…”

“…Returning to the regional dimensions of technological change, the implications of Tables 1 and 2 should not be underestimated as they provide important insights onto which the smart specialisation thesis is based (Whittle & Kogler, 2019). At its core, Smart Specialisation is a vision of regional development based around existing place-based capabilities (Balland et al, 2019;Foray et al, 2011).…”

Local and nonlocal knowledge typologies: technological complexity in the Irish knowledge space

“…Following these insights, and with the development of more sophisticated databases several authors have begun developing more systematic ways at evaluating the value of new technological knowledge (Quatraro, 2010;Kogler et al, 2013, Rigby 2015. Particularly influential in this regard is the emerging framework of technological relatedness (Whittle and Kogler, 2017), which has recently found residence alongside the writings of economic complexity (Hidalgo and Hausmann, 2009;Hidalgo, 2015) and the branching capabilities of regions (Penrose, 1959;Boschma and Frenken, 2012).…”