Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
incumbents than of actors who enter during the same period. Information about other
potential partners for knowledge exchange needs time to develop.
Regional dimension
Another question, regarding increasing connectedness of the Jena innovator network, is
related to the issue of whether this is a result of an increase in internal relationships or
whether more external partners are responsible for this development. In the former case,
this could be on indication of the danger of getting into a technological lock-in situation
(Grabher, 1993). In the latter case, the external pipelines may either be interpreted as
protection against such an unfortunate situation (see Bathelt et al., 2004) or as an indi-
cator of the attractiveness towards external partners. From Table 17.1 we take that the
share of external actors increased slightly from about 54 per cent in P1 to 58 per cent in
P2, suggesting that knowledge exchange with external partners tends to intensify over
time.
In Table 17.7 we present a more i ne-grained analysis of these external relations. We
distinguish relations between only internal actors (
internal
) on the one hand and between
an internal and an external partner (
external
) on the other. The development of these
two relations from P1 to P2 as well as the respective development of the ratio between
the two is stated for both types of relation (
co
and
sm
) and for dif erent types of actor
(private vs. public, persistent vs. non-persistent). For the
co
-network we i nd that both
external
and
internal
increase in absolute numbers over time. However, the increase in
internal
is comparatively larger, leading to a decrease in the ratio
external
/
internal
. Thus,
the development of the
co
-network clearly shows an increasing inward orientation in
relative terms (from 1.682 to 1.563), although in absolute terms the number of external
actors in the network has been increasing. The same holds true for the
sm
- network (from
2.000 to 1.605). We conclude from this pronounced inward orientation combined with
an increased number of external actors that the knowledge portfolio and cooperation
potential of Jena seems to be quite attractive.
In view of these results, in a further step we distinguish between private and public
actors to see if certain types of actor are responsible for the observed development. The
results in Table 17.7 indicate that while in both groups we observe an increasing inward
orientation (the share
external/internal
always decreases), this tendency seems much
more pronounced for the public actors compared to private actors - compare the decline
for public actors in the
co
- network (
sm
-network) from 1.857 to 1.524 (from 1.769 to
1.273) for the public actors to the decline from 1.649 to 1.593 (from 2.091 to 1.741) for
the private actors.
Alternatively, if we distinguish between permanent innovators and the ones that exit
or enter, we observe that for these groups, the development goes in dif erent directions.
First, we i nd that the entrants are on average more outward oriented than the actors
that exited the network; hence in Table 17.7 the non-permanent actors are responsible
for an increasing outward orientation regardless of the type of relation (from 1.929 to
2.140 in the
co
-network and from 1.958 to 2.367 in the
sm
-network). To explore the man-
ifold reasons for this behaviour surely lies beyond the scope of our exercise and would
require in-depth interviews with the responsible actors. All we can of er at this point is an
informed guess and plausible interpretation. In the tradition of industry in the GDR (the
former East Germany), economic and technological activities in Jena were organized in
