Abstract
AbstractHow regional industries can develop in an economically sustainable way is high on the research agenda. While the literature on regional change has focused primarily on historical case studies, it has said less about the barriers that hinder the desired change. This article contributes to a better understanding of barriers in regional innovation systems that hamper new regional industrial path development. Furthermore, the article analyses how a new knowledge organisation, the Centre for Research‐based Innovation Offshore Mechatronics in the Agder region of Norway, can contribute to overcoming these barriers. The Centre, which is a policy instrument funded by the Research Council of Norway, aims to contribute to path extension and potentially path modernisation. However, since its foundation, oil prices have dropped severely, resulting in new conditions for the Centre and its partners. The article concludes by discussing whether and how the Centre has contributed to overcoming the barriers that hinder developments beyond path extension.
Highlights
All regions have a constant need for industrial renewal, which becomes more evident in times of increased globalisation and digitalisation (Frangenheim et al, 2020)
The empirical case on which this article is based is the new knowledge organisation—the Centre for Research-based Innovation Offshore Mechatronics (SFI OM)—w hich is a policy instrument funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN)
With the SFI’s initial aim of further strengthening the already strong oil and gas industry in the region, the most likely outcome of its activities would be path extension, with incremental innovation only leading to a continuation of the already existing industrial path (Isaksen et al, 2018), or, in a best-c ase scenario path modernisation, involving industrial renewal through major changes based on new technologies or organisational innovations (Isaksen, Tödtling, et al, 2018)
Summary
All regions have a constant need for industrial renewal, which becomes more evident in times of increased globalisation and digitalisation (Frangenheim et al, 2020). This article focuses on an organisationally thick and specialised region Because this type of region is lacking “internal diversity of industries, knowledge bases, supporting organisations and institutional forms that are seen as critically important for developing new regional industrial paths” (Asheim et al, 2019), they most often promote path extension, which is described as “business as usual” or path modernisation, which involves renewal of the existing path based on new technologies or organisational innovations. In an organisationally thick and specialised RIS, the industrial base is narrow, and knowledge and support organisations are tailored to this base (Asheim et al, 2019) Such an environment creates strong interdependencies and connectedness, which signal the potential for a strong network failure when the infusion of new knowledge from outside the network is limited. The institutional setting in which a RIS is embedded includes both formal and informal institutions, often referred to as the “rules of the game” (North, 1991)
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