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Industry 4.0 requires that manufacturing firms not only innovate but also generate more radical and different varieties of innovation, often incorporating new types of knowledge. To advance such types of innovation, several studies in Innovation and Economic Geography foreground that firms need to combine knowledge in novel ways. The contribution of this paper is to investigate in-depth how manufacturing firms with traditional roots combine new generative knowledge in and beyond a local productive system (LPS), what enables them to access and integrate such knowledge from external sources, and how this relates to the firms' innovation performance, with a focus on radical and varied forms of innovation. Findings show that firms standing out in terms of innovation performances combine complementary types of knowledge through internal and external sources, particularly at national and international levels. Moreover, firms that have complementary knowledge internally are able to access new knowledge beyond the borders of the LPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the relation between the critical knowledge base of firms and how firms respond to incentives embedded in the institutional framework surrounding them. The analysis gives us a better understanding of the complex development of the food sector in Southern Sweden in the past decades. Theoretically, the paper combines concepts of path dependency and knowledge bases, and applies this framework to a set of development trajectories of firms in the Scanian food sector. Three development paths are identified—path extension, path renewal and new path creation. Findings illustrate that these are rooted in different knowledge base combinations of firms, which make them respond differently to similar place- and sector-specific institutional conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on recent evolutionary thinking, this paper focuses on inter-industry differences in the receptiveness of firms to inflows of skills from different domains of the external economy. The empirical analysis of innovation performance finds that firms’ dependences on recruiting outside their own industry domains were inversely related to the vibrancy of knowledge dynamics within them. Moreover, inflow distances that are ‘optimal’ from the perspective of learning are closer to manufacturing firms’ own industry domains, than they are to the domains of services firms. As a result, only low-tech manufacturing and technology-intensive services firms exhibit the receptiveness to inflows from ‘related’ industries found in prior evolutionary research. Firms in high-tech manufacturing, by contrast, capture strong learning benefits from intra-sectoral mobility flows, whereas firms in traditional professional services depend on skills developed outside their own industry domains. Implications for the theory, empirics and policy relevance of evolutionary economic geography are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]