The evolution of knowledge spaces : innovation, indicators and drivers

This dissertation contributes on assessing how knowledge spaces change over time and on which are the factors driving their development. Technologies in innovation literature are regarded as a collection of combined components. These components are represented in the network form through knowledge spaces. Technologies follow an evolutionary process but the role of technological spaces and their evolution are still aspects not sufficiently developed in literature. The thesis focuses in Chapter 2 on the categorisation of innovation activities. Once the main features of different types of innovations responsible for changes in technological paradigms and therefore in technological spaces have been analysed, the dissertation provides newly crafted indicators to assess their evolution in Chapter 3. The reshaping and evolution of technological spaces is also influenced by some drivers, the focus is on two possible drivers that could influence the evolution of technological spaces. The first external regional driver analysed is cluster policies and the second internal regional driver is the ability of organizations in knowledge recombination activities. In Chapter 4 we measured both short term impacts and long term ones of cluster policies on the evolution of knowledge spaces. The results show that the program contributed both to increase the importance of specific technological fields in winning regions. Chapter 5 recognises the factors that influence the propensity of organizations to combine knowledge differently from others. We found that the orientation towards applied or basic research and the embeddedness in the regional innovation network matter for the way in which technologies are combined. Different empirical methods have been used to produce results spacing from Difference in Difference to Quantitative Text Analysis to Social Network Analysis. Moreover, as main data sources both patents and publications have been used.