ABSTRACT
This book emphasizes the role of interactions as strategic processes in the production of new knowledge, and therefore to understand the creation of knowledge as a systemic and distributed activity. In a systemic approach, innovation and knowledge are the results of complex and articulated feedbacks and complementarities between public and private research and innovation activities, and between different technological knowledge bases, such as those generated in firms active in different but related sectors. Learning takes place within and outside the firm, and the exploitation of complementarities both between firms and between these and universities and R&D institutions is most important in supporting the eventual generation and distribution of knowledge and innovation. Within complex innovation system, for instance, the innovative activity of large firms often relies upon science-based knowledge. Large firms are often characterized by R&D-intensive innovation activity, while they subcontract the production of components and intermediary inputs to small firms. These latter in most of the cases are specialized in manufacturing processes that build upon tacit know-how. At the same time, large firms can cooperate and even contract pure research to the academic system. In such a situation, very often consultants and gatekeepers provide knowledge-intensive services in order to integrate R&D-intensive competencies into the daily routines of small producers or the outcome of pure research into the activity of large firms. Each of the different actors is specialized into the creation of specific knowledge and yet they are very complementary in order to sustain the overall innovation process we finally observe. Knowledge flows and complementarities between science-based actors and scientific knowledge on the one hand, and industrial players and more specific and tacit competencies on the other, are therefore at the base of sustained innovative and growth performances at the micro and aggregate level.
