Abstract
Abstract A kairos constellation designates a temporarily existing opportunity for a group of actors to take advantage of a coincidence of favourable circumstances in order to realise a shared target. Starting from the observation that kairos constellations are ubiquitous in human individual and social life, the research question of this paper is how the Triple Helix and the wider innovation policy research literature deals with such constellations. The authors develop a conceptual framework for kairos constellations and discuss empirical evidence that kairos constellations have been scrutinized in innovation research literature. Then, the concept is applied to an example from the Triple Helix – based cluster policy. The key message of this paper is that Triple Helix researchers should systematically study kairos constellations because they are a critical force in the evolution of innovations systems as well as business firms, which has not yet been systematically examined.
Highlights
Research using the Triple Helix as its guiding principle has uncovered a wide body of evidence on the emergence, structures and functioning of networks that developed between universities, industry and government (Cai and Etzkowitz 2020; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000; Etzkowitz and Zhou 2018; Ranga and Etzkowitz 2013)
The Triple Helix model unveils the dynamics of these constellations and offers an evolutionary theory of innovation processes (Lawton Smith and Leydesdorff 2014; Leydesdorff 2000)
We develop a conceptual framework for Kairos constellations and apply it to an example from the Triple Helix – based cluster policy
Summary
Research using the Triple Helix as its guiding principle has uncovered a wide body of evidence on the emergence, structures and functioning of networks that developed between universities, industry and government (Cai and Etzkowitz 2020; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000; Etzkowitz and Zhou 2018; Ranga and Etzkowitz 2013). Innovation Research – Macro & meso Perspectives – Innovation Research – Micro Perspective – Evolutionary Economics the kairos moment as argument of engineers’ rhetoric (Miller 1992; Miller, Selzer 1985) Authors analyse the chances for industrial late comers to catch-up the technological advantages of hitherto leading industrial global players and changes in industrial leadership (Lee, Malerba 2017); prominent examples of catch-up cycles and changes in industrial leadership are analysed in detail, such as the mobile phone industry (Giachetti, Marchi 2017), the memory industry (Shin 2017), and the camera industry (Kang, Song 2017) Dependence of innovation processes on multitude of factors; non-linear character of (most) innovation processes; supply and demand side factors in innovation processes; role of government programmes in the evolution of major new technologies, especially in the USA, allows for the reconstruction of kairos constellations at the beginnings of the development of major new technologies (Mazzucato 2014; case studies of successes and failures of such programmes in Block 2011) Relationships between R&D and innovation; role of incremental vs. basic innovations; endemic uncertainty (Allic 2011: 243–4) of outcomes especially in the development of new technologies and of basic innovations; property rights with regard to inventions; experiences of and with innovation management, obstacles met, identified windows of opportunity in firm level innovation processes (Tyre, Orlowski 1994) Draws researchers’ attention to general patterns of the evolution of economic structures and institutions, underlining the role of knowledge, rules and (not necessarily rational) actors in processes of economic change, occasional inspiration by biological insights into development processes using the mental constructs found there as thought-generating impulses (Doper 2016; Allen 2016; Nelson, Winter 1982)
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