Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
anywhere across geographical boundaries. In such an approach, it is clear
that knowledge and information are treated as being largely synonymous.
However, once tacit knowledge is taken into consideration, it becomes
clear that technology as a whole cannot be easily traded or exchanged,
and only the potentially public knowledge component is, at least partially,
liable to be accounted for in terms of transactions costs analysis.
When narrowing the notion of technology to something akin to infor-
mation, and concentrating primarily on the organization of the exchange
of such information, there is a tendency to overemphasize the appropri-
ability issue (Winter 1987, 1993). In contrast, the returns on innovation to
a firm may well be mainly returns to its creation of capabilities, a process
supported by, but not simply reducible to the generation of new poten-
tially public knowledge. In addition, knowledge can at the same time be
both 'sticky' within the organization or firm boundaries, while also being
'leaky' or mobile, generating outflows in the environment immediately
external to the firm (von Hippel 1994; Wernerfelt 1984). As such, ideas,
inventions and practices which are difficult to move within organizations
under some circumstances under other circumstances may prove to be
quite capable of moving outside of them (Winter 1987; Steinmueller 2001;
Seely Brown and Duguid 2001), an observation which thereby questions
the centrality of the appropriability issue.
The third limitation of the transactions costs view is related to the
sources of innovation in the industry, or to the technological regime
prevailing in the cluster. The transactions costs view alone is unable to
account for how the innovation and knowledge accumulation processes
themselves contribute to the emergence and evolution of clusters and
regions. It is therefore necessary to map the knowledge and technology
characteristics discussed in Chapter 4 onto the simple transactions costs
framework presented. The reason for this is primarily that the multina-
tional firm is the focus of this topic and, as we have seen, in recent decades
changes in the nature of knowledge and capabilities have been responsible
for transforming MNEs simply from technology transferors to technology
creators. As such, changes in O, L and I advantages will all determine how
the logic of an MNE itself, as well as the type of spatial agglomeration in
which it locates, will evolve over time.
5.5.3
An Extended Technological Classification of Spatial Types
In order to discuss the evolutionary dynamics of the variety of spatial
cluster types we observe, the transactions costs-based classification scheme
reported in Table 5.1 is now extended here in Table 5.2, in a manner in
which the main underlying knowledge conditions of the cluster are now
Search WWH ::




Custom Search