Innovation Networks and Clusters: The Knowledge Backbone

In Economics, networks are increasingly used to describe the many links created between independent companies, as well as between them and other institutions (universities, banks, venture capital, etc.). In the current global and knowledge-based economy, they can be characterised as knowledge factories and knowledge boosters. They feed the internal processes of innovation (collaborative innovation) or the external processes of innovation, created by the propagation effects that come from inter-firm collaboration.
The book explains how innovation networks are at the origin of the production of new knowledge that will be transformed and used in common as well as in separated production processes. This characteristic of networks as knowledge factories gives incentives to further investment in the production of knowledge and ensures the cumulativeness of the innovation process. Some of the authors clearly take a territorial point of view and study how clusters (in different parts of the world: Europe, Eastern Asia and North America) propelled by the quality of the innovation networks they enclose, can be characterised as knowledge pools into which the local actors will be able to draw to reinforce their individual and collective competitiveness. This book also includes analyses of the quality of the networks built within clusters, which may help their identification.

The Editors: Blandine Laperche is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Research Unit on Industry and Innovation (ULCO, France). She is co-editor of the journal Innovations, Cahiers d’économie de l’innovation, and of the Journal of Innovation economics. She is also head of the Forum «The Spirit of Innovation». Her Research mainly focuses on the following topics: technological innovation and intellectual property rights, management of innovation and corporate strategies and innovation networking.
Paul Sommers is Professor at Seattle University, teaching in the master’s level Public Management Program and in the Department of Economics. His research focuses on clusters, economic development strategy and economic impact estimation.
Dimitri Uzunidis is Professor of economics at the Technical University of Crete (Greece) and Director of the Research Unit on Industry and Innovation (ULCO, France). He is President of the Research Network on Innovation and editor of the journal Innovations, Cahiers d’économie de l’innovation and of the Journal of Innovation economics. Specialised in international industrial economics and economics of innovation, Dimitri Uzunidis focuses his research on the political economy of globalisation, on the innovative strategies of firms in the context of globalisation, on the dynamics of innovation in innovative milieu and on the place of the entrepreneur in the dynamics of capitalism.