White Spaces Innovation in Sweden - Innovation policy for ... - Vinnova

WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDENtion‟ is incremental innovation and quite close to „imitation‟ because it takes an innovationfrom one field and applies it to another. Innovation agencies sometimes facilitatethis by mounting innovation „fashion shows‟ where a „smart textile‟ in automotive seatscan be a solution to the quest for stay-clean medical uniforms in hospitals (Chapter 3).The harder, more rewarding innovation route comes where strange attractors merge atwhat complexity theorists call „the edge of chaos‟ which is both stable and unstable withmuch interaction, communication and „buzz‟ going on between, for example, clustersor, more precisely, innovation-spotting members of two or more clusters. A breakthroughhere among say mobile telephony, internet media and life sciences may lead tomany big leaps forward in mobile diagnostics and even therapeutic treatment deliveredby „smartphone‟.In what follows, we shall proceed to an explication and exemplification of regionalchange by directing discussion towards the concept of „strange attractors‟ which, for thepurposes of this report show, with startling illumination, how related variety and relatednessof the unpredictable kind, occur as emergent features of complex systems likeregional economies. On occasion, reference is made to the substance of Chapter 2 inrelation to such concepts as „dialogical‟ reasoning and „narrative discourses‟ involvingstorytelling and theatre as means of sense-making (Weick, 1995) about complex organisationalprocesses. This is because communication and connectivity are key to understandinghow innovation is made. Elsewhere, deeper analysis of the operation of varietyupon regional innovation, principally by firms as system agents, is provided. Althoughthe whole tenor of this report concerns the functioning of variety in relation to innovationin externalised and complex system adaptation and organisation, elements of theexplanation offered are assisted by the complexity science critique of theories of internalisedsystems by which learning organisations are presumed, wrongly, it is shown byStacey (2001) to function. Thus the chapter proceeds with initial explanations of „emergence‟as the process by which transition (transformation or innovation) occurs frominteraction between diverse entities (i.e. the interaction of entities displaying variety). InMartin & Sunley (2011) these are organised in an MLP way. Here they are more geographical(i.e. spatially interactive). It then moves into a discussion of the role of „attractors‟of path interaction that are better-known to regional scientists as (regional) „pathdependences‟. That is, an industry in a region evolves with an historical trajectorywhich, possibly after a regional or industrial „shock‟, deviates to an intersection with adifferent industrial path dependence in the same region (proximity effect). One variantof these kinds of interaction is „strange attractors‟ where there is no a priori reason foreven imagining their trajectories might converge and coalesce to produce innovation. Inpassing, mention is made of „normal attractors‟. These are less surprising, as, for example,when the pre-existence of a certain engineering knowledge allows for innovation ina neighbouring engineering field. In complexity science, such „neighbourhood effects‟,facilitate „learning curve‟ thinking, like „scale-effects‟ the relative predictability of77