An Automotive Innovation Network

In this chapter, I first describe characteristics and challenges of German automotive suppliers and manufactures followed by an analysis of the structure of their collective knowledge-base, focusing on e-mobility technologies. Second, I introduce a model for the analysis of evolutionary change patterns of an interfirm innovation network (Pyka and Fagiolo, 2005; Pyka and Hanusch, 2006) which consists of a sample of German automotive firms. A stochastic actor-based model is applied to estimate parameters which reflect the impact of hypothesized effects.