Firms navigating through innovation spaces: a conceptualization of how firms search and perceive technological, market and productive opportunities globally

Abstract

The main contribution of this paper is a theory-based conceptual framework of innovation spaces, and how firms must navigate through them to innovate. The concept of innovation systems - at the regional, sectoral and national levels - have been highly influential. Previous literature developing the concept of innovation systems has stressed the importance of institutions, networks and knowledge bases at the regional, sectoral and national levels. This paper primarily draws upon an evolutionary and Schumpeterian economics perspective, in the following three senses. The conceptualization of 'innnovation spaces' focuses upon how and why firm search for innovations is influenced the opportunities within certain geographical contexts. This means that the firm create opportunities and can span different context, but they are influence by the context in term of the access, flow and co-evolution of ideas, resources, technology, people and knowledge, which help stimulate business innovation in terms of products, process and services. The paper concludes with an agenda for future research and especially the need to focus on globalization as a process of intensifying linkages across the globe.

Productive opportunities, uncertainty, and science-based firm emergence

“…In particular, we build on and extend two areas of research: (1) resource-based studies of science-based firm emergence Wright et al 2004) and (2) entrepreneurship and the development of productive opportunities (McKelvey 2016;Nason and Wiklund 2015).…”

“…1 This paper builds on the view that opportunities are created over time, which is in line with both the perspective on technological opportunities from evolutionary economics and the entrepreneurship Bcreation^per-spective. These positions have been fruitfully brought together by McKelvey (2016), who argues that, in their search processes, firms monitor three types of opportunities-technological opportunities, market opportunities, and productive opportunities. We extend this line of research by returning to Penrose's (1959Penrose's ( /2009) work and attempting to capture the intuition behind Penrose's conception of productive opportunities, reinterpreting and building on this conception by drawing on contributions from evolutionary economics.…”

The Spatial Spillover Effect in Hi-Tech Industries: Empirical Evidence from China

“…Reference [19] clarifies the organizational process of generic technology design and describes it through uncertain experimental evolutionary strategies. Based on the viewpoint of the evolution theory and Schumpeterian economics, Reference [20] holds that "innovation space" should focus on the search process, which can affect the opportunities in specific geographical environments. Reference [21] believes that the evolution of product space has a strong path dependence, but the heterogeneity in scale, efficiency, and international exposure impacts this dependence.…”

Relating business model innovations and innovation cascades: the case of biotechnology

“…McKelvey ( 2004 ) identifies two existing dominant business models as well as ten emerging business models in life sciences. The taxonomy is based on the dichotomies of whether they primarily do activities in-house or through a network and whether they primarily exploit scientific or technological opportunities (McKelvey 2016 ). These ten new models, she argued, were emerging at the same time as the two dominant models of classical biotechnology model and vertically integrated model of pharmaceuticals were under high pressures to change.…”