Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
fundamentally shaped by the underlying conditions affecting the creation
and reproduction of knowledge. These 'technological regimes' (Winter
1984), as we will see in Chapter 5, are argued to play an important role in
determining the interdependencies between industry characteristics and
spatial agglomeration.
4.4.2
Technological Regimes, Paradigms and Sectoral Taxonomies
The characteristics of knowledge and technological learning processes are
known as a 'technological regime' (Winter 1984). A technological regime
is defined (Malerba and Orsenigo 1990, 1992, 1993) as being a particular
combination of: appropriability conditions (i.e. the returns to innovation);
technological opportunities (i.e. the likelihood of innovation); degree of
cumulativeness of technological knowledge (i.e. the extent to which the
amount of innovation produced in the past raises the probability of current
innovation); and the characteristics of the knowledge base (i.e. the type of
knowledge upon which the firm's activities are based). Technologies and
sectors exhibit substantial differences in the extent to which innovation
can be protected from imitation by competitors. In addition, the size and
scope of technological opportunities vary greatly across different sectors.
Technological opportunities, and thereby a firm's growth opportunities,
are governed by the prevailing technological paradigm. This is defined
as 'a system of scientific and production activities based on a widespread
cluster of innovations, representing a response to a related set of techno-
logical problems, and relying on a common set of scientific principles and
on similar organizational methods' (Cantwell 2001, p. 447; Dosi 1984;
Perez 1985; Freeman 1987). The characteristics of the technological para-
digm are that the degree of tacitness and specificity, specialization or per-
vasiveness of knowledge, and the extent of cumulativeness of innovation
(or its correlation over time) show particular industry characteristics (Dosi
et al. 1995). The technological paradigm is therefore a consequence of the
interrelatedness in both the knowledge conditions and the problem solving
activities between firms and industries.
Technological regimes identify common properties of innovative proc-
esses in different sets of production activities, and this helps to explain the
asymmetries in the dynamics of industrial competition at a sectoral level,
and as we will see in Chapter 5, also at a geographical level. Changes in
knowledge bases, technological procedures and trajectories, determined
by changes in the prevailing technological paradigm,
9
affect the combina-
tion of the properties and conditions which make up the technological
regime in each industrial sector. Changes in paradigms ultimately explain
industrial structures and their innovation dynamics (Nelson and Winter
