Innovation Networks and National Interests

A sIMP Research Program

Alexandra Waluszewski

October 2011



Over the last decades, globalisation and specialisation have given the

economic landscape new, transnational transaction patterns. Production

and related activities that traditionally were dealt with the by the

firm and, to a large extent, within national borders, have

increasingly been taken over by related supplier-customer

relationships, stretching over local, regional and national borders

(Håkansson et al. 2009; Castells 1996). During the same period the

role of the state, at least within the EU, has profoundly changed.

From active engagement in technological development and industrial

renewal, through state procurement among others, the role of the state

has been mainly limited to concern engagement in the commercial

utilisation of research and in the creation and upholding of

market-like arrangements for private as well as public organisations

(Lundin et al, 2010; Edquist et al. 2006).



The overall purpose behind the establishment of the sIMP Research Team

and the research program Innovation Networks and National Interests

is to explore what these changes in the business and political

landscape mean for specific nations? attempts to affect industrial

renewal, i.e. for attempts to affect innovation networks. Innovation

networks are (in contradiction to Innovation Systems) the outcome of

materialised interactions among business and organisational actors

involved in developing, producing and using a certain set of

products/services (Håkansson et al. 2009). The overall research

question concerns how the state, in a transnationally interdependent

business landscape, can affect innovation networks. This implies that

the opportunities and restrictions in relation to affecting

infrastructure and affecting specific economic actors have to be

investigated.



The research program will include two empirical settings, with the

common denominator that their innovation patterns are of great

national interest. Furthermore, in both areas the state’s involvement

is significant but in different ways. One empirical setting is the

health care sector and the other the construction industry. The

expected outcome of the research program is identification of

opportunities and restrictions for the state to affect the innovation

networks of these empirical areas, i.e. how the state can act in

relation to the development, producing and using of new

products/services. The research program will include joint as well as

individual research projects, and will also include a workshop series

with two annual meetings, the first taking place in March and October

2012.



The sIMP Research Team is organisationally located at the STS Centre

(Science and Technology Studies Centre) at Uppsala University with the

goal of utilising the research experiences of two different but

overlapping research networks: The multidisciplinary research network

related to the STS Centre, with a shared interest in the relationship

among academic research and the economic utilisation of knowledge

(www.sts.uu.se), and the IMP Group with its extensive research

concerning numbers of aspects related to the content and effect of an

interdependent business landscape.



The sIMP Research Team is co-ordinated by Alexandra Waluszewski,

Research leader at the STS Centre, in co-operation with Håkan

Håkansson, Professor Norwegian Business School BI and Visiting

Professor at the STS Centre, and Enrico Baraldi, Professor, Department

of Engineering Science, Division of Industrial Engineering &

Management, Uppsala University.



The following representatives of the IMP research community are

engaged in the sIMP Research Advisory Board: David Ford, Professor

emeritus, University of Bath, and Visting Professor, Euromed,

Marseille; Lars-Erik Gadde, Professor, Chalmers University of

Technology; Debbie Harrison, Associate Professor, Norwegian Business

School, BI, Oslo; Annalisa Tunisini, Professor, Universitá Cattolica,

Milan; Tibor Mandják, Professor, Corvinus University, Budapest; Ivan

Snehota, Professor, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Judy

Zolkiewski, Manchester Business School, UK.