Innovation as an Interactive Process: a Theoretical, Quantitative and Qualitative Research

In economic literature, innovation has been traditionally considered as an exogenous force, resulting from scientific knowledge, which spills over the markets. Over the last decades, a more comprehensive understanding of the innovation as an interactive process has progressively emerged. In the new perspective, knowledge production, diffusion and transformation into innovation arise from a collective effort occurring within inter-organizational networks composed by heterogeneous actors connected each other in a systemic modality. The present dissertation aims at exploring the nature of innovation as an interactive process. The overall goal is to verify the mechanisms regulating inter-organizational knowledge exchange within innovative networks. According to the complexity of the subject, a multiple approach is proposed for facing the study scope from different points of view. In the first place, the research addresses diverse forms of collective innovation in the context of R&D. Three main levels are tackled: policies for stimulating inter-organizational knowledge generation and exchange, firm-firm collaborations and industry-science relations. Secondly, three different analytical methodologies are applied for investigating innovation process inclusively with distinct tools and focus lens. In the former paper, a theoretical and historical reconstruction is proposed to discover how the understanding of innovation as an interactive process has arisen within the economic studies. A theory-based research design in this case allows to illustrate the scientific evolution of the key concepts and models proposed for explaining the nature of knowledge and role of innovation and how they are in turn reflected in different policy rationales. Secondly, two empirical works are conducted for exploring the actual modalities of interactive knowledge transfer occurring within concretely established interactions. The first paper is based on a quantitative methodology directed to analyze the inter-firms knowledge flows within cooperative networks created by R&D projects sustained by public subsidies. The main goal is to detect which are the most relevant factors which favor the acquisition of external knowledge on the basis of the individual firms’ characteristics affecting their absorptive capacity. The statistical analysis is conducted at regional level on a sample of data collected from the case of Piemonte’s innovation programs for the period 2007-2013. The latter study proposes a qualitative investigation of industry-research relations. The inquiry is conducted on multiple cases of long term collaborations between the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and national firms. The study aims at enlightening the way through which the cooperation is set, developed over time and assessed by the involved organizations. The chosen analytical approach compares the combined perspectives of researchers and firms on the same experience and complements the various narratives for inductively identifying the most significant patterns across the single cases.