Networking, context and firm-level innovation: Cooperation through the regional filter in Norway

Rune Fitjar and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

No 1516, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: The paper assesses the role for innovation of one aspect which has been generally overlooked by evolutionary economic geography: context. It analyses how context shapes the impact of collaboration on firm-level innovation for 1604 firms located in the five largest city regions of Norway. Specifically, the analysis shows how the benefits to firms of collaborating within regional, national, and international innovation networks are affected by the knowledge endowments of the region within which the firm is located. Using a logit regression analysis, we find, first, that only national and international networking have a significant positive impact on the likelihood of innovation (the former only for process innovation), whereas the regional knowledge endowments have no direct effect. Second, regional cooperation is particularly effective in regions with high investments in R&D, whereas international cooperation is important in regions with an educated workforce – and regional and national collaboration may be ineffective in such cases. We conclude that, in the case of Norway, context is essential in determining the capacity of firms to set up networks and innovate. Regions with an educated workforce can use the resulting absorptive capacity to successfully assimilate knowledge being diffused through global pipelines from faraway places. However, this absorptive capacity is likely to be heavily filtered if regional firms mainly rely on internal connections within Norway.

Keywords: Innovation; interaction; networking; context; human capital; R&D; firms; Norway (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05, Revised 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-net and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1516.pdf Version May 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Networking, context and firm-level innovation: Cooperation through the regional filter in Norway (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:1516

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).