Long waves in the geography of innovation: The rise and decline of regional clusters of creativity over time

We explain the rise and decline of regional clusters of creativity over time. We argue that this dynamic is the result of the interplay of individually rational decision-making processes with collective externalities of unplanned social encounters; migration to particular places at particular times interacts with a preference to engage with similar others. This interplay leads to the rise and subsequent decline of opportunities for encounters between people who operate in different domains, a basic requirement for radical innovative change. The consequent decline of formerly innovative regions creates opportunities for new innovative regions to emerge. We test this theory using three independently curated datasets. The first includes the geocoded places and years of the births and deaths of 124,860 notable individuals who lived in Europe between 1000 and 1900 CE, used to measure opportunities for domain-diverse encounters in regions and regions’ time-varying attractiveness in global mobility networks. The second and third datasets consist of the geocoded locations and founding years of 3,165 Catholic monasteries and of 16,596 publishing houses. We use these organizational innovations as robust, independent indicators for a region's capacity to foster incremental and radical change. Our paper aims to open a broader social network perspective on the rise and decline of regional clusters of creativity over time.     

How to facilitate knowledge diffusion in complex networks: The roles of network structure,knowledge role distribution and selection rule

The diffusion of knowledge within organizations provides opportunities for interpersonal co-operation, improves creative ability and therefore leads to competitive advantage. Focus of prior literature on knowledge diffusion has been on identifying factors that influence individuals' behavioral intentions to seek and share knowledge. However, knowledge diffusion as an enigmatic, emergent and organizational-level process is more than the simple aggregation of individual attributes and needs to be further investigated. Accordingly, this study focuses on three distinct system-level factors, i.e., architectures of connections among individuals, distributions of knowledge roles and designs of selection mechanisms and analyses their effects on knowledge diffusion. To be more specific, we examine three distinct knowledge roles: seekers, contributors and brokers. We also distinguish between three types of selection mechanisms: objective selection mechanisms, feedback-based selection mechanisms and random selection mechanisms. By conducting agent-based simulations on four representative networks, i.e., regular networks, random networks, small-world networks and scale-free networks, our results show that the optimal knowledge diffusion performance can be achieved on scale-free networks where all agents implement objective mechanisms and show characteristics of brokers. Moreover, our results (a) highlight the significance of brokers, (b) illustrate the superiority of objective selection rules and (c) demonstrate that scale-free networks provide an optimal framework for knowledge diffusion. Furthermore, we also find the interdependent relevance of these three factors to knowledge diffusion and propose a qualitative explanation of these findings.     

The evolving relations between government agencies of innovation policymaking in emerging economies: A policy network approach and its application to the Chinese case

Literature on innovation policy reveals little of how relations between government agencies as policymakers evolve. Taking the policy network approach, this paper investigates three mechanisms underlining the evolution of inter-government agency relations in emerging economies – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence, and applies them to the analysis of the evolution of innovation policymaking in China. Operationally, the paper proposes a social network analysis (SNA)-based method to quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network, which consists of 463 innovation policy documents formulated by its central government ministries between 1980 and 2011. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has been not only sustained through the intervention of policy agendas but also self-organized because of policy network’s nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in China’s innovation policy network’s evolution differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. This work advances our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and has implications for innovation policymaking in emerging economies.     

Explaining technical change and its impacts over the very long term: The case of the Atlantic sardine fishery in France from 1900 to 2017

As an industry based upon the harvesting of wild resources, the fishery is often used in economics to showcase the effects of its specific nature on human behavior and the impacts of that behavior on the fish stock itself. The common-pool status usually encountered in the use of these resources makes them especially vulnerable to major shifts in the supporting ecosystems, but also to rapid technical change. In most other parts of the economy, technical change and the creative destruction that it brings along are viewed positively, and even given central role in recent theories of growth. Happily for the creatures of the ocean that are hunted, fishers do not fit the mould of Schumpetarian entrepreneurs bent on creative destruction. However, the technology that does drift onto boats has had concerning effects on the status of fish stocks with important economic and cultural consequences. We present a narrative of the French sardine fishery using the evolutionary theory of technical change. The wild binary segmentation approach was applied on a time-series of French sardine landings from 1900 to 2017. This analysis revealed three significant production change points associated with important technical changes in the fishery. The first change point, in 1927, is related to the introduction of the purse-seine in France. The introduction of the mid-water trawl is the second change point in the early 1970s. A third change point occurred in 1998, where we see a reswitch from mid-water trawl to purse-seine. Collectively, these results highlight the technological changes in sardine production that occurred, but more importantly, the impacts of these changes both on the structure of the population of sardines, and on the industry. The lesson we derive from this case study is that technical change should be considered as a succession of shifts rather than a unidirectional history.