A failure trichotomy in knowledge exploration and exploitation

Robin Gustafsson () and Erkko Autio

Research Policy, 2011, vol. 40, issue 6, 819-831

Abstract: In this article, we review current rationales for policy intervention in innovative activities. Focusing particularly on market and system failure rationales, we disentangle related underlying mechanisms for knowledge exploration and exploitation. We provide a novel contribution to the system failure literature by distinguishing between system-level inertia and inhibited emergence. Our conceptualization of inhibited emergence draws on literatures related to neo-institutional sociology, the social construction of technology, and on organizational cognition and learning literatures, and it presents elemental socio-cognitive mechanisms that influence and direct knowledge exploration and exploitation in innovation systems. We compare related, yet theoretically distinct concepts of market failure, system-level inertia, and inhibited emergence, and show how each addresses distinct coordinative mechanisms and field-level dynamics and related socio-cognitive processes.

Keywords: Market; failure; Systems; failure; System-level; inertia; Inhibited; emergence; Socio-cognitive; failure; Social; construction; of; technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733311000503
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:respol:v:40:y:2011:i:6:p:819-831

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().