Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sixteenth century and has a long tradition as a state with abun-
dant industrial activity. Conversely, Baja California's main cities
are relatively new; migrants from central Mexico represent a high
proportion of its population, and its industrial development has
been strongly linked to FDI attraction schemes launched in the
mid-1960s.
Source:
Adapted from Iammarino et al. 2008
they can be carried out most effectively, improving the firm's access to
resources and capabilities, and facilitating the penetration of new markets.
The main purpose is to gain access to localized capabilities that are com-
plementary to the firm's own ones, at the same time broadening its own
capacity of knowledge transfer to individual nodes of the GPN. Such
knowledge linkages open up new development and upgrading opportu-
nities for the various regions and the firms involved. Indeed, it has been
argued that GPNs in particular industries - such as in electronics - are
actually shifting to global innovation networks (GINs), with the integra-
tion of functions such as engineering, product development, design and
research within inter-firm networks which are located for the most part
in emerging locations and in regions within new-comer economies (Ernst
2010). As we will see in Chapters 7 and 8, while there is clear evidence
that US, European and Japanese MNEs still exert a tight control on this
changing geography of innovation, mainly through their scientific and
intellectual property dominance, the offshoring via GINs is generating a
handful of new innovative hubs in Asia (Ernst 2010, p. 5).
The precise form and effects that these knowledge and production net-
works take and provoke depend upon many factors. These factors include
the knowledge base of the MNE and the local economy, the industry
structure and sectoral composition of the local economy, the nature of
local agglomeration forces, the type of transactions and relationships
between global and local firms, the intra-region absorptive capacity, and
the extra-region linkages and degree of openness (Bell and Albu 1999;
Giuliani 2005). All these aspects will be explored in Chapter 5.
4.7 CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, the sources of innovation at the micro-level of the firm
were examined from the perspective of traditional economic theory,
