ABSTRACT
The innovation model in the Norwegian oil industry is broadly disintegrated and collaborative. In this way, it shares many governance features with other sectors, outside the natural resources sector, in which producers confront intractable technological and market uncertainty. The article outlines the character of vertical disintegration and collaboration in the oil, pharmaceuticals and automobile industries and explores the distinctive and remarkably formal form of ‘contracting for innovation’ that organises innovation in each. By highlighting the common ways in which these industries systematically generate possibility through collaboration, the article destabilises the conventional distinction, central to development economics, between natural resources and industry in the development process.
