Considering Adoption: How are Innovations Validated in Cultural and Science-based Industries?

This thesis examines the process by which innovative new products come to be accepted and adopted in the marketplace. As these products are inherently uncertain and not readily accepted and adopted, market intermediaries play an important role in the validation and subsequent diffusion of innovations. In this thesis I demonstrate that these social processes have significant impact on the spatial organization of the market development process. Drawing on a diverse but complementary set of literatures – including the economic geography of innovation, communities of practice, social networks, the sociology of scientific knowledge and reception studies – I sketch out an adoption-centric approach to understanding the social dynamics of the innovation process.Using comparative case studies of musical theatre and pharmaceutical vaccines, this research finds that the process of market development involves a range of participants that are each embedded in their own distinctive community. The social and geographic configuration of these intermediaries varies for different knowledge-intensive products: validating expertise for cultural products such as theatre is situated predominantly in ‘global nodes of excellence’, whereas for science-based goods such as vaccines this is situated in the local marketplace. These findings have implications for marketplaces in ‘beta-cities’ such as Toronto, which are not global nodes of excellence. Without these validating intermediaries, what role do beta cities play in the development and diffusion of cultural products? Akin to research on users’ involvement in the development of innovations, findings suggest there are qualities that make beta cities important sites for experimentation and the testing of new theatrical works.An adoption-centric perspective such as the one developed in this thesis sheds light on the social and geographic forces that shape the uptake of innovations. Application of this perspective has potential to significantly strengthen policy initiatives in support of the demand-side of regional innovation systems.