Innovation and Sustainable Learning in Small Low-Tech Firms: Structural Dynamics, Power and Governance in Industrial Networks

This book is about how small firms in low-tech sectors survive industrial restructuring. By looking at the packaging industry in a high wage country such as Denmark the book investigates the dynamic of the process of innovation within industrial networks. Contrary to the Schumpeterian approach to innovation as a source of creative destruction, innovation in these networks leads to sustainable construction of advantages without jeopardizing the existence of other firms. Sustainable learning is crucial to innovation and firms? success, but only if the two conditions of access and willingness to share knowledge are respected. In order to define the dynamic of the learning processes and the sources of innovation and knowledge, the book introduces a ?structural dynamic approach? based on the analysis of the interrelations between power structures, learning processes and markets dynamics.

Lecturer (Associate Professor) in international political economy and innovation at the Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University, Denmark. He works as independent consultant for international NGOs, the United Nations and the European Commission in the areas of international migration, innovation and local development.