Development Blocks in Innovation Networks. The Swedish Manufacturing Industry, 1970-2007

The notion of development blocks suggests the co-evolution of technologies and industries through complementarities and the overcoming of imbalances. This paper studies groups of closely related industries and their co-evolution in the network of Swedish product innovations, by combining statistical methods and qualitative data from a newly constructed innovation output database, SWINNO. The study finds ten sets of closely related industries in which innovation activity has been prompted by the emergence of technological imbalances or by the exploitation of new technological opportunities.