August's interesting links

This month I am going to start posting links to interesting material that I see (but obviously haven't necessarily read) that month.

• A website devoted to Chris Freeman's life http://www.freemanchris.org/ .

• T Niedomysl, H K Hansen. What matters more for the decision to move: jobs versus amenities Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pages 1636 - 1649

Abstract.

Highly skilled workers are increasingly recognised as a key competitive asset for regional development, and claims have been made that emphasise the importance of certain amenities for the prospects of attracting this particular group of workers. We use a recent large-scale survey to investigate the relative importance of jobs versus amenities for the decision to migrate, as perceived by the migrants themselves. The paper thereby adds important insights to the existing literature that has hitherto mainly focused on analysing the extent to which aggregate migration flows correlate with employment-related or amenity-related factors. The results show that jobs are considerably more important for the decision to move among highly educated migrants compared with migrants with lower education.

• D L Prytherch `Vertebrating' the region as networked space of flows: learning from the spatial grammar of Catalanist territoriality' Environment and Planning A 2010, volume 42, pages 1537 - 1554

Abstract.

For decades theoretical debates about political restructuring have resorted to and co-constructed geographical concepts of territory and scale, interpreting `new' and `Euro' regionalisms as processes of reterritorialization and rescaling (and the politics thereof ). But nested and hierarchical theories of scale have been severely critiqued, and bounded notions of territory opened to question. How then to develop a more relational understanding of the region without trading one limiting theoretical master narrative for another? Drawing inspiration from recent attempts to do just this, in this paper I ask: what can we learn about the complex and relational spatiality of the region, and thus scale and territory, through the spatial vocabularies of regionalists themselves? Using the case study of the Northwestern Mediterranean, I explore the imaginaries and stratagems of Catalan regionalism and transboundary macroregionalism, particularly in the neighboring regions of Catalunya and the Comunitat Valenciana and their proposed integration in a Euroregion called the Arc Mediterrani. While Catalanists increasingly emphasize networked economic relationships and flows, they do so within a structured, territorial, and in many ways bounded understanding of Mediterranean spatial relations. How Catalanists vertebrar territori (articulate or structurate territory, in Catalan) offers an alternative spatial grammar for thinking about how various spatialitiesöincluding network and geographical scaleöare distinct yet co-implicated in the social production of regional and macroregional territory.

• The geography of transport systems http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/ A great website of maps and diagrams of transport flows across the North America and the globe.

Connectivity: internet flows, airline flows and our internet usage

Ethan Zuckerman on TED this year has some really interesting observations on social networks. His focus was primarily on how we create with filter bubbles. We stay within our own interest boundaries. Maybe the old economy and the new economy have something in common - it hard tomove outside your milieu. Actually Zuckerman suggests its easier to get stuff across the globe than move outside your digital bubble. He has some great diagrams of the lack of international news carried by US media. He highlights wiki entries geo-coded which shows that they mostly relate to the USA, Europe, Brazil and Australia.

Ethan says we focus on the infrastructure of globalisation - he uses the example of airline routes rather than the content of the wiring - the number planes or passengers moving between places.





On a related subject, recently, I came across the work of Chris Harrison. His images reveal the city to city connectivity of global society. Unsurprisingly, there is huge activity within the USA and then between the USA and Western Europe. Take the time to look at his images.
http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/index.html

Essentially, connectivity maps are the same if we talk of flights or bits and bytes.

Zuckerman could be onto something. Perhaps there is a growing difference in our trade behaviour and our person to person connections.

Chis Freeman

I have heard on the grapevine that Professor Chris Freeman who headed SPRU for many years and with the late Keith Pavitt establish Research Policy died on the weekend. His wiki page has the same information.

The work of Chris Freeman is rightly held in high respect. In recent years I have been tracking down early work of the OECD on science and innovation. Chris' writings of the 1960s still read well today. More insightful and clearer than much of what the journals currently publish on the subject.

For those with an interest in science policy and consequential indicators, his work on 'the problems of science policy' (1968) is an informative read and one that reveals that for the last 40 years we haven't gone much beyond filling in his agenda.

Architecture #4: Delight, Beauty and Happiness

You are probably wondering how it is possible that an innovation system could be analysed on its properties for aiding delight, beauty or maybe a more popular word of late - happiness. I had (until recently) been pondering the same thing for over a decade. Some ideas appear to offer intriquing possibilities without any possibility of resolution. So it was with this one. More than a decade ago I regularly had coffee with an architect friend in Canberra who first introduced me to the eloquent summary of architecture as firmness, fitness and delight. At the time I was searching for a language that invoked a 3Dness to the structural studies of economies and 'architecture' seemed like a useful word. At the time I couldn't envisage anything more that just 'form' in various guises.

However, curiously, as I have been reading Alain de Botton's book on architecture, this third piece of puzzle has begun to clarify itself for me. On page 71 (of my version) he states:

... However, there might be a way to surmount  this state of sterile relativism with the help of John Ruskin's provocative remark about the eloquence of architecture. The remark focuses our minds on the idea that buildings are not visual objects without any connection to connects which we can analyse and then evaluate.Buildings speak - and on topics which can be readily discerned. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.


SO of  what do innovation systems speak?
Do they speak of openness and inclusion or merely the trendy and wealthy?

Do they speak of just economies or societies and communities?


#1. Of what do innovations systems speak
       - democracry - maybe, economies - definitely, but societies and communities - I'm less certain.

Today 'innovation' is invoked as the panacea for the ills of our economies but not of our societies.

Should we start asking questions about who innovation is for etc. This has been the realm of science and technology studies but I am beginning to think that we need to urgently dialogue this in Schumpeterian side of the literature as well. Is creativity just for new products and services? What of the poor and disadvantaged even in advanced economies - those that don't go to schools with all the latest technology etc? What of innovations and their effects on the disabled communities. Some innovations improve their lives and others make it harder.

Are schools just to produce clones of a previous era or can we envisage something more?







#2 What of happiness.

In recent years there has been a flood of literature.

One observation (stated in Graham 2005 in World Economics p45)
Easterlin, in his original study, revealed a paradox that sparked interest in the topic but is, as of yet, unresolved. While most happiness studies find that within countries wealthier people are, on average, happier than poor ones, studies across countries and over time find very little, if any, relationship between increases in per capita income and average happiness levels. On average, wealthier countries (as a group) are happier than poor ones (as a group); happiness seems to rise with income up to a point, but not beyond it. Yet even among the less happy, poorer countries, there is not a clear relationship between average income and average happiness levels, suggesting that many other factors—including cultural traits—are at play.

Other factors that are important are: social connections, social services such as education and health etc.

This is another TED video.




#3 - Conclusions

If we want to speak of innovation - particularly 'national innovation systems' then isn't it time that we move beyond a purely narrow economics context. All we are doing is replacing one discourse which emphasised monetary policy along with labour and natural resource exploiting development paths with a technological creation one.

The science and technology studies literature which has developed largely in parrallel with the innovation literature already emphasises culture and gender issues amongst others - isn't it time that there was greater informed cross readings.

Interestingly, there was a conference ths year that seems a step in the right direction from the perspective of innovation systems and happiness.

Innovation and Inequality: From Pharma and Beyond

Workshop in Pisa, Italy, 15-16 May 2010, Conference organisers: Mariana Mazzucato and Luigi Orsenigo
http://www.open.ac.uk/ikd/events/innovation-and-inequality/

Architecture #3: Function

As I continue my series on structure concepts, the second characteristic of architure is 'functionality'.

 

But what could function mean in a social setting?

  

Given that we are here thinking of the more limited organising princple of 'innovation systems' then the first type of function which comes easily to mind is that it is to produce innovations. Sounds simple enough and there is plenty of literature related to measuring that. However, an interesting paper by Edquist and Zabala (2009) provides some valuable insights.

Edquist, C. and Zabala, J. (2009) 'Outputs of innovation systems: a European perspective' Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) Lund University. WP 2009/14

So we could understand the functioning of an innovation system on the basis of the success it has in producing outputs as measured against these dimensions. The paper makes an early attempt at conducting a comparison across these categories for European countries.

 

A paper that more directly addresses the idea of functions was published by Hekkert et.al. back in 2007. These authors compared different approaches that had been taked to the question of 'function'. They concluded with a list of seven:

• entrepreneurial activities
• knowledge development
• knowledge diffusion through networks
• guidance of the search
• market formation
• resources mobilization
• creation of legitimacy/counteract resistance to change

from: Hekkert et.al. (2007) 'Functions of innovation systems: A new approach for analysing technological change' Technological Forecasting & Social Change 74 (2007) 413–432.

 

This list clearly represents a higher order of  'system' activity than the economic outputs measured in the Edquist paper - perhaps all of which are measures of the first function - entrepreneurial activities.

Finally, we might come up with a definition of function in terms of what occurs in a particular place. In this sense function might be narrowed to a single value structure (I avoid the word chain because as I may have already said in this blog a chain is far to linear a concept for use in today's economy). Within such a structure what role does each region play? To know this we would need to know not just what a region makes in a general sense but what it does in very particular sense.

A paper in this vein that I haven't seen referred to that much is by Feser (2003) who that the idea that occupational data can tell us much about what regions do. As Feser states 'Industry cluster analysis has long focused on value chain relationships and innovation flows to characterise groups of linked industries. A neglected dimension of interindustry linkage is the utilisation of joint labour pools' (p1953).

Feser, E. (2003) 'What Regions Do Rather than Make: A Proposed Set of Knowledge-based Occupation Clusters' Urban Studies, Vol. 40, No. 10, 1937–1958, September 2003.

One challenge is that while such macro studies are useful we still need to know what a particular innovation system makes - what is the strategy for a particular place. For example in piece of work I am just finishing with Adam Holbrook on the Vancouver economy it is again clear that while is on the semi-periphery, Vancouver's cost structures are too high for manufacturing but seeming the geographic dynamics place it too far away for large corporations to really develop a base. The strategic response is for the clusters to consist of small and very small businesses which engage in rent seeking IP selling behaviours.

Perhaps what would be really uiseful at this stage is for an organisation like the OECD to establish an innovation studies wiki. Authors could up load citations to their work and a few findings with a suitably structured matrix. Each region specific case study could then be geocoded on a map. If for no other reason such a tool would be valuable to understand which places are heavily studied and which places are understudied.

Back to the blog

After a few months away from the blog I am hoping to get right back into it.

I have been travelling and also working on some papers particularly to do with innovation system in Vancouver Canada, the relationship between a product's modularity and the international trade configurations as well as papers on networks and the need for innovation policy that cuts across the entire economy.

Anyway hope you enjoy the blog.
Brian

Architecture #2: Form

We can most easily understand 'form' as the 'structure' of innovation systems.

Probably most innovation studies fall into other categories such how they work, why they work or even do they work which aren't really related to their architecture, but there is still a wealth of knowledge of the structure of innnovation systems.

Problematically, as Machlup noted 50 years ago the word 'structure' is often just a jargon word that obscures meanings as much they enlighten. It appears to me that we can create a taxa of at least three classes of 'structure'. The first world be shift/share analysis which look at the changing composition of industry or innovation patterns. A second class would be 'specialisation' which we would typcally see in analysis of national industry or export patterns. The third and final group of studies would be those that are focussed upon the relationships between actors in the innovation system.


Shift Share.
I am not aware of any particular pieces of work that have linked shift share analysis, which is typically associated with the changes in the sectoral breakdown of GDP over time, and the innovativeness of economies.

Specialisation
Often specialisation has been used as a term related to relative geographic concentrations.

Great work on this topic has been done on innovation and specialisation by people like: Keld Laursen.
(2000), Trade Specialisation, Technology and Economic Growth: Theory and Evidence from Advanced Countries, Cheltenham, UK and Lyme, US: Edward Elgar, ISBN 1 84064 385 4.

That book deals with export specialisations, many other have considered technological specialisation.

Recent work has begun to create a clearer distinction between specialisations and concentrations of activitiy. See for example: Cutrini(2010) 'Specialization and Concentration from a Twofold Geographical Perspective: Evidence from Europe', Regional Studies, 44: 3, 315 — 336.

Relationships

However, most of the innovation studies interested in structure have focussed most on relationships. Different kinds of relationships have been described in the literature on Innovation.

Some examples include:

Redrawn from. Geroski, P. (1994) Market Structure, Corporate Performance and Innovative Activity. New York: Claredon Press – Oxford
.
In this diagram we can see a complex system of innovation interdependencies. A couple of primary ‘sectors’ – mechanical engineering and chemicals are key developers of innovations that flow onto a number of other sectors. Some sectors such as electronics and instruments are intermediate players, both benefiting from innovations generated elsewhere but also providing innovations to others. Finally, there are a range of largely ‘recipient’ complex integrating sectors such as auto, aerospace, paper, food and construction etc which are typically end points for a wide range of technological inputs.


Another presentation.

Redrawn from:
Silvani, A., F. Cancemi, C. DeBresson and X. Hu (1996) ‘Innovative self-sufficency or regional interdependence: Lombardy and the Rest of Italy’ in DeBresson, C. (ed) (1996) Economic Interdependence and Innovative Activity. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.


Other surveys of the producers and users of innovations have revealed similar patterns. Silvani et al. (1996), for example, have shown quite a similar pattern exists for the innovation interdependencies within just a single Italian region (Lombardy). Figure 2 reveals not only the innovation flows but also key flows of goods (combining an innovation producer-user matrix with standard input-output matrix data. Again, auto, paper, and textiles are recipient sectors, while machinery and chemicals are important innovation generating sectors. In this region the wood and rubber sector has important innovation interdependencies with the chemicals and machinery sectors.

Finally, the analysis of Cesaratto et al. (1996), based on similar data to Silvani et al., is quite interesting. These authors categorise industries into a quite a different format than has typically been developed, although principally reinforcing the emergent understanding of the technological division of labour and the interdependencies. Their taxonomy groups industries into design based capital goods, investment based intermediate goods innovators, complex innovators, marketing oriented innovators, cost oriented consumer goods innovators, construction, services and consumption.

Cesaratto, S., S. Mangano, and S. Massini (1996) ‘New Dimensions on Division of Labor: The ase of Italy (1981-85)’ in DeBresson, C. (ed) (1996) Economic Interdependence and Innovative Activity. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

In my own work I kept the interactions down to a single industry but looked at the relationships across borders.

.
So in the diagram above I show that I-O interactions within Europe for the transport industries favour Germany (the arrows are backwards flows of finances) goods flows in opposite direction.

Thus innovation studies have contributed significantly to our understanding of the relationships within the economy.