Innovation and Proximity: Territories as Loci of Collective Learning Processes

Abstract

The article focuses on the relationship between technological and organizational innovation, and territories. This relationship is connected to interactions between learning processes, institutions and spatial patterns of innovative activities. Starting from a conception of the economy as a learning and evolutionary process instead of a static allocative mechanism, we analyse the role of several types of proximity in innovative processes. If one considers innovation as a problem-solving oriented process, it may be analysed as grounded on non-market inter-actions, and knowledge-based. The article shows how geographical, organizational and institutional proximities relate to the operation of localized innovation systems. The institutional framework is of particular importance in this context owing to the fact that such innovation systems are grounded on collective action at a territorial level and rely upon shared patterns of behavioural and cognitive rules. The analysis of institutional proximity raises the problems of the embeddedness of interrelations between actors in a territorial framework, and the transferability of tacit knowledge. This framework is extended to the analysis of spatial patterns in the emergence and diffusion of industrial models. In our conception, the emergence of an industrial model has territorial foundations, but it is also dependent upon an institutional learning process. However, once stabilized and diffused, its relation to geography and territories evolves and transforms. We illustrate this analysis by referring to the emergence and diffusion of industrial models in the automobile industry. Finally, the framework is used to analyse the spatial effects of organizational changes in product development. These changes are both institutional and technological.