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Before World War II, Dutch State Mines, the national, state owned coal corporation, was confronted with major challenges, specifically that foreign coal was sold at dumping prices in the home market. At the same time, coal cleaning needed to be improved in order to offer higher quality coal against lower coal processing costs. In this paper we illustrate how State Mines relied on its innovative capacity in order to overcome the economic, technological and market changes. The coal cleaning innovations at State Mines show how absorptive capacity was of prime importance for the firm's innovative capacity. External knowledge acquisition as well as internal knowledge building proved to be relevant, although the balance changed over time. While initially acquisition and assimilation of external knowledge (potential absorptive capacity) were essential to improve the existing coal cleaning processes, internal knowledge building was needed to come to real improvements in coal cleaning. The establishment of a licensing company was essential to exploit this knowledge. An important feature was that State Mines was always well aware of its lack of capabilities and knowledge and open to search for and learn from knowledge outside its firm boundaries. Moreover, expectations determined the search for external knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of a trend-setting company in the electricity sector in the Netherlands and its innovative response to the combined influence of liberalization and climate change. The company became a first mover through its invention of the concept of green electricity and the development of a new facility for biomass combustion. The successful introduction of these innovative practices was facilitated by corresponding changes in corporate culture and strategy. These changes also enabled the company to develop new networks that bridged gaps in knowledge and gave legitimacy to enable the successful adoption of the new practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is central in stimulating economic growth in cities, regions and advanced capitalist economies in general. There is, of course, no one-to-one relation of the number of firms in creative industries to economic growth. Innovation is a key mechanism explaining the relationship of creative industries with economic performance. Based on an empirical study in the Netherlands we explore the effect of creative industries on innovation, and ultimately on employment growth in cities. In the Netherlands the three specific domains of creative industries - arts, media and publishing, and creative business services - make up 9 per cent of the business population. Drawing on survey data we find that firms in creative industries are indeed relatively innovative. Yet substantial differences are found across the three domains: firms in the arts domain are clearly less innovative, most likely due to a different (less market-oriented) dominant ideology. In addition, firms in creative industries located in urban areas are more innovative than their rural counterparts. We go on to analyse how the concentration of creative industries across cities is connected with employment growth. With the exception of the metropolitan city of Amsterdam, we find no measurable spill-over effect from creative industries. The presence of the creative class (in all kinds of industries other than creative ones) appears to be a much stronger driver of employment growth than creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impelled by a crisis in Dutch horticulture in the early 1930s, two Dutch food preserving companies, Hero and De Betuwe, decided to start producing non-alcoholic drinks made from fruits and vegetables. Different kinds of knowledge were needed for this radical innovation. Innovation trajectories were established and knowledge was incorporated, but the knowledge sources and 'knowledge filters' of the two companies were very different. Hero's Swiss parent played an important role in transferring Swiss knowledge of production techniques to its Dutch subsidiary company. De Betuwe, on the other hand, mainly relied on knowledge provided by the existing Dutch horticultural innovation network. While succeeding in the soft drink market was to a certain degree a competition between publicly available knowledge and private knowledge, in the end both companies succeeded in producing a comparable product, but their routes to success were different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]