Learning at the boundaries in an “Open Regional Innovation System”: A focus on firms’ innovation strategies in the Emilia Romagna life science industry
Introduction
Over the last decades several new concepts have emphasised the systemic character of innovation, which overcomes the old view of innovation being just a specialised activity that depends directly on the amount of resources involved in subsidised science and in internal-to-the firms R&D laboratories (Audretsch et al., 2002, Metcalfe, 2005). This has been elaborated along different directions, looking at innovation as:
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an interactive linked-chain connecting numerous departments (R&D, design and engineering) and activities within a firm (Kline and Rosenberg, 1986);
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a complex modality (Carlsson, 1994) involving private and public actors, through industry–university collaborations, claimed to be fruitful for both the actors involved in the relationship, within a national system of innovation or a triple-helix approach (Etzkowitz, 1998, Freeman, 1987, Lundvall, 1992);
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a specific system characterised by its sectoral dimension, where innovation and technological change show different rates, types, and trajectories, depending on the sector in which they take place, and where agents and institutions of a sector exert a major influence (Malerba, 2002, Malerba, 2004);
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a distributed process (Coombs and Metcalfe, 2000, Robertson and Smith, 2008) that integrates components, skills and knowledge from several organisations especially in the fields characterised by increasing modularisation of complex products (Brusoni and Prencipe, 2001) and decomposability of innovation-related tasks (Valentin and Jensen, 2003);
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a geographically bounded spatial system, whose extension can be either national3 or regional, or local (Cooke et al., 1997, Cooke, 1998, Lundvall, 1992, Nelson, 1993, Saxenian, 1994). In a globalised (and interconnected) world, the examination of spatial scale seems quite a difficult task, being “compressed” between the existence of overlapping multiple scales and spatial flows. In fact, while contemporary reflections deal with the issue of the internationalisation of national innovation systems (Carlsson, 2006), others reflect upon the local-global connections (Bathelt et al., 2004).
Assuming the complex theorising about the nature, evolution, and impact of the innovation systems, this paper investigates the existence and the performance of an Open Regional Innovation System (ORIS model). This model is characterised by the firms’ adoption of an open innovation strategy, which overcomes not only the boundaries of the firms but also the boundaries of the region.
Our empirical analysis is grounded on the study of 78 life science firms in Emilia Romagna, which was described as a RIS.4 Using primary data collected at the firm level, through field interviews, the study explores in detail innovation openness in the life science RIS, focusing on the firms’ willingness to overcome both the organisational boundaries, through the use of external sources of innovation, and the regional boundaries, through long distance research collaborations. The paper applies quantitative research methodologies. In particular, it presents some descriptive analyses on the innovation sources (internal and external) used for innovation and it applies the social network analysis to map the geographical distribution of R&D linkages. The study then offers some indications on the effect of innovation openness, testing the impact of internal and external (regional and global) innovation sources on firms’ patenting activity. The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 focuses on the theoretical and empirical background and introduces the research issues and objectives. Section 3 describes the method and data used in the analysis. Section 4 gives descriptive results, while Section 5 contains an econometric analysis. Section 6 proposes some concluding remarks and hints for further research.
Section snippets
RIS and open innovation models
RIS is one of the most influential concepts developed in the context of regional science studies, which has grown rapidly since the middle of the 1990s (Braczyk et al., 1998, Cooke et al., 1997, Iammarino, 2005). The notion of RIS lies on the crossroads of two main bodies of literature: evolutionary theories of economic and technical change, which conceptualise innovation as the result of complex, non-linear social processes, stimulated and nurtured by several actors and factors within and
Empirical setting, data source, and sampling procedure
The empirical context of this study is the life science industry in Emilia Romagna.6 Our definition of the sector includes the following specialisations: biomedical, biotechnology, pharmaceutics and computer science industry applied to the medical fields. Therefore, our study does not focus only on dedicated biotech enterprises, including all firms active in the knowledge areas of the modern life science industry.
Innovative search strategy
In order to assess the degree of openness of firms’ search strategy, firms were asked to indicate which external sources they use for their innovation activities, and evaluate the importance of each source on a scale from 1 to 10. The interview questionnaire contained a list of 16 possible sources (see Table 2), grouped together under three different headings (market-based, institutional-based, and semi-public). Overall, our findings indicate that firms use on average about 5 external knowledge
Econometric analysis
The econometric analysis presented here investigates the role and relevance for firms’ innovativeness of the various components of the open innovation strategy that are respectively: (a) the internal innovative efforts (R&D investments), (b) the external sources of knowledge used for innovation and, last but not least, and (c) the capabilities of building innovative networks. The statistical method applied is a negative binomial regression. The variables entered in the model and the regression
Conclusions
The aim of this paper was to provide some empirical evidence on a new model of ‘open RIS’ (ORIS). The empirical evidence presented focused on a representative sample of life science firms operating in the Emilia Romagna RIS.
The innovation system approach describes innovation as a systemic and interactive process that crosses the firm's boundaries to include several external sources of knowledge and information available in both the industry and institutional sub-systems. In order to explore
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the “Programma di Azioni Innovative” of the Regione Emilia Romagna and ICaTSEM (Institutional Changes and Trajectories of Socio-Economic Development Models), EU-7th Framework Programme. Thanks are due to Silvano Bertini of the Assessorato alle Attività Produttive Sviluppo Economico and Maria Grazia Zucchini of ASTER (Associazione Scienza e Tecnologia Emilia Romagna), who provided invaluable assistance. Any remaining errors are our own.
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