Marcus Dejardin (p), André Spithoven

Michael Fritsch

Innovation accounts for a significant part of regional economic growth and contributes to the resilience of regions by creating a regional innovation ecosystem (Acs et al., 2017). As the complexity of innovation increases, the adequate knowledge base of SMEs can be questioned. SMEs rely increasingly on boundary spanning activities, referred to as open innovation (OI) practices. The paper considers three OI practices – knowledge spillovers, external R&D and collaborative linkages – and their effects on performances – radical product innovation and the innovative turnover it generates. OI practices are relevant for SMEs since they struggle with the liability of smallness; scale limitations, and fewer technological assets to bargain with (Dahlander and Gann, 2010; Chesbrough, 2011). As SMEs install OI practices, their interactions with actors in the ecosystem are posited beneficial to SMEs performance (Spithoven et al., 2013). These performances feed back into the regional ecosystem.
Five waves of the European innovation survey are analysed (2004-2012) for the regions in Belgium. Each region has its specific ecosystem to which innovative SMEs contribute.
First findings point to differences of OI practices across regional ecosystems. SMEs in the Flemish Region show more open innovation strategies than the Brussels-Capital and Walloon Region. Inclusion of relevant control variables shows that open innovation practices in innovative SMEs differ in their impact on introducing radical innovation and generating innovative turnover across regions. This implies that SMEs also differ across regions when it comes to translating their openness in innovative performances. These will inevitable have a bearing on the regional ecosystem.

Michael Fritsch (p)

Marcus Dejardin

Networks of innovators are often characterized by high levels of actor-turnover. In a study of inventor networks in German regions over five three-year periods, Fritsch & Zoellner (2017) found that more than 78 percent of all actors are present in only one observation period. 14.51 percent are active in two periods and only about 7 percent are contained in the networks in more than two periods. On average, 32.34 percent of the actors that are present in a network in a certain period have also been included in the previous period. Hence, a majority more than 65 percent of inventors in a regional network occur in the respective sub-period for the first time. As a consequence, the majority of links among actors are also rather short term.

The consequences of this high level of actor-turnover or ‘fluidity’ for the workability of the respective innovation system are largely unexplored. Generally, the high levels of fluidity that can be observed in real world inventor networks can be regarded an indication that there are benefits of switching cooperation partners despite considerable transaction costs. These benefits may particularly involve flexibility that is required by innovation as a discovery procedure as well as the absorption of new knowledge.

Empirical analysis of the performance of inventor networks (Fritsch & Zoellner 2017) show that a high turnover of inventors in the networks has no significantly negative effect on indicators such as the number of patents per R&D employee (patent productivity). On the contrary, the effect of discontinued actors may be significantly positive while a high share of continuing actors is related to a relatively low level of patent productivity (Fritsch & Zoellner 2017). The explanation for this result may be that the knowledge of those actors that disappear from the system remains in their cooperation partners who continue in the network. Moreover, new actors add new knowledge to the system that may compensate for the loss of knowledge of disappearing actors that has not been completely absorbed in the system.

JEL-classification: O3, R1, D2, D8
Keywords: Innovation networks, knowledge, R&D cooperation, patents

References:

Fritsch, Michael and Moritz Zoellner (2017): The Fluidity of Inventor Networks. Jena Economic Research Papers # 2017-009, Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

Address for Correspondence:
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
School of Economics and Business Administration
Carl-Zeiss-Str. 3
D-07743 Jena, Germany
m.fritsch@uni-jena.de, moritz.zoellner@uni-jena.de