ABSTRACT
The concept of social capital has been extensively applied by economists and other social scientists to the analysis of a wide range of phenomena: from economic growth (Knack and Keefer, 1997) and development traps (Woolcock, 1998) to political participation (Di Pasquale and Glaeser, 1999), institutional performance (La Porta et al., 1997) and the spread of secondary education (Goldin and Katz, 1999). However, the analysis of the link between social capital and the genesis of innovation has remained relatively under-explored in ‘mainstream’ economics literature. Economists of innovation and economic geographers have recently tried to fill this gap but no clear consensus has emerged on the impact of social capital on innovative performance and on the underlying transmission mechanisms (Cohen and Fields, 2000; Hauser et al., 2007; Kallio et al., 2009; Laursen and Masciarelli, 2007; Patton and Kenney, 2003; Sabatini, 2009; Tura and Harmaakorpi, 2005).
