Search

There is an increased need of understanding organizational and institutional underpinnings of firms' global knowledge search. This paper addresses thick and diversified RIS in two different territorial contexts and explores firms' use of physical and virtual space in their search of innovation relevant knowledge. Through interviews with ICT and new media SMEs from Scandinavia (Oslo, Malmö) and Beijing, findings show that low-cost and virtual search space is very important for innovation; furthermore, regional, global and virtual space co-evolve and mutually reinforce each other. Global search strategies differ between the two contexts, emphasizing the importance of a regional institutional-organizational framing supporting trust, collaboration and motivation for global search. In order to reap the benefits of the regional-global-virtual dynamics, being thick and diversified is not enough to have global reach and attractiveness. [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]