The sources of innovation: the firm and the local system - Multinationals and Economic Geography - page 160

private sectors whose activities and interactions generate, import, modify
and diffuse new technologies within and outside the region ' (Cooke et al.
1997; Howells 1999; Cooke 2001; Evangelista et al. 2002). Importantly, the
RIS framework embraces different territorial scales and utilizes various
geographical units of analysis (Doloreux and Parto 2004). Its broad scope
allows for a sufficient generalization and it is therefore considered a suit-
able background for devising innovation and industrial policy.
In the RIS approach it is implicitly assumed that the elements character-
izing the national system can be largely transposed to a smaller territorial
scale to help define the local system. Following Dopfer et al. (2004), micro-
structures refer to individual components or actors, that is, individuals,
firms and other organizations that through their relationships (market and
non-market) and their attributes (competencies and functions) build up and
maintain systems of rules (Carlsson 2003). Macro-structures, on the other
hand, are comprised of the population of meso-systems and their interde-
pendence. The top-down ( macro- to- micro ) view of the RIS thus implies
identification of characteristics which are already recognized for the NIS
(Howells 1999; Iammarino 2005). These characteristics include the internal
organizations of firms, inter-organizational relationships and, more spe-
cifically, the type and intensity of interactions between the business sector
and the rest of the economic system. The RIS relationships and interactions
relate variously to: the role of the public sector and innovation policy; the
institutional framework (administrative, political, financial, legal, fiscal,
educational, and so on); the industrial structure, including the organization
of both public and private R&D activities; the spatial structure, including
the relative geographical position, the degree of urbanization, the scale and
scope of agglomeration; the degree of openness, and the capacity to attract,
absorb or tap into external resources including the integration into global
innovation networks, often flag-shipped by multinational corporations.
Such a list is clearly not exhaustive and underlies a broad definition of
territorial systems of innovation. The elements listed encompass the types
of specific institutions that help to promote innovation and knowledge,
as well as the wider socio-economic system in which political and cultural
influences and specific modes of governance foster innovation structures
and performances (Lundvall 1992; Rodríguez-Pose 1999; Cooke et al.
2000; Freeman 2002; Garofoli 2003). However, the identification of com-
ponents, relationships and attributes, is in many ways more complex at the
regional level than at other levels, such as the national, sectoral or techno-
logical levels (Carlsson 2003). The reason is that regional systemic advan-
tages (or disadvantages) are also argued to depend on attributes known as
'untraded interdependencies', such as informal flows of knowledge, inter-
active learning, and the degree of embeddedness, 14 which generate the bulk