Systems of innovation beyond borders: linked clustering and the role, scale and spatial structure of extra-territorial interdependencies

The study of technological innovation covers a broad range of issues. Everything, from the public funding of science, research policy to the role of universities, from the business development of new products and services, the financing of innovation, institutional arrangements through to the spatially located conditions that promote innovation has been considered by analysts. Mostly these subject matters have been conceptualised as components of 'national? systems of innovation even when studied at different spatial levels (including regions and clusters). The emphasis of systems research is that places (nations or localities), within the global economic landscape, are especially important for the creation, spread and use of innovations. The systems perspective on innovation encourages, due to results on the development of endogenous capabilities and the proximity of knowledge spillovers, a view that production and innovation geographies are enclaves of activity, innovating largely in isolation from what is occurring in other technologically isolated systems. A central concern in the present thesis is that this view of national and sub-national systems does not provide a sufficiently comprehensive perspective on the global architecture of production. The primary goal is to begin to develop an innovation systems framework that combines the consideration of the advantages of individual spatial entities (clusters) with an analysis of value chains as they extend across regional and national borders. To achieve this, the analysis focuses on evaluating the role, scale and spatial structure of inter-cluster linkages. The literature on role of interdependencies within clusters suggests that user producer and tacit knowledge flows are more important for innovation than traded interdependencies. To aid the analysis of the scale and spatial structure of interdependencies and rather than be restricted by case studies methods which would facilitate analysis of only one or two clusters, two inter-country input-output datasets covering nine OECD countries (33 sectors) and fifteen European Union countries (25 sectors) were developed for the research project. To analyse these datasets in a manner that was consistent with the goals of the research new modelling software was constructed. The analysis of these spatial structures reveals that substantial associations exist between some clusters, with most national clusters maintaining one important connection. The analysis reveals differences in the global architecture of production for assembly based systems (motor vehicles and aerospace) when compared to modular component based systems such as electronics and computing. Just as businesses form networks, then it seems reasonable, on the basis of the research presented here, to suggest that global production consists of networks of clusters which are organised in hierarchical circuits. This evidence supports the argument developed through the present thesis that certain elements of innovation systems can be better understood through a crossborder cluster-to-cluster framework