Innovative culture in district innovation systems of European ceramics SMEs

ABSTRACT

We need to understand the dynamics of current local production systems in the form of industrial districts and, particularly, how culture and innovation are interlinked. In this paper, we argue that the district innovation system approach, which covers the innovation systems and industrial district literatures, provides a set of ideas useful for understanding the role of culture in innovation in industrial districts. We study the role of innovation culture in two of the most important European ceramics industrial districts in Italy and Spain. Specifically, we analyse how, within a given district system, the innovation culture, networks and social structure, and their inter-relations, influence the interactions among those agents actively participating in the development, diffusion or adoption of innovation. We identify the cultural elements that are decisive in these innovation systems and whether these elements are substantially equal between the two countries or whether there are differences in their cultures, processes and innovation systems. Our main finding is that the cultural dynamics in district innovation systems differs among countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• innovation
• district innovation system
• European ceramic tile industry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Daniel Gabaldón-Estevan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2086-5012

Notes

1 It is important, first, to clarify Portes's (2001; 2007) distinction between the cultural and the social as differentiated dimensions of reality (Fernández Esquinas, 2012). The cultural dimension comprises values, norms, cognitive frames, roles and institutions while the social structure is made up of power, social classes, hierarquies and organizations.

2 Recall that learning is an important cognitive element of the cultural dimension frame.

3 Interviewees included managers in ceramic, electro-mechanical and glaze companies, representatives of employers’ and workers’ associations, representatives of public organizations specialized in technology or trade, managers of research organizations responsible for innovation and development in the industry, and academic researchers. The interviews provided information on the tile production process, on the roles of relevant actors in the tile districts, on how innovations are produced and disseminated in the market, and the participation and motivation of different actors in the innovation processes. They also provided more general information, such as global production trends, emergence of new competitors and trade.

4 For these companies deregulation of employment, promotion of anti-dumping measures and failure to comply with environmental standards can be more important than innovation for achieving sectoral competitiveness.

5 Degrowth fosters a reduction of energy and material throughput, needed in order to face the existing biophysical constraints. It challenges the omnipresence of market-based relations in society and the growth-based roots of the social imaginary replacing them by the idea of frugal abundance. It is also a call for deeper democracy, applied to issues which lie outside the mainstream democratic domain, like technology. Finally, it implies an equitable redistribution of wealth within and across the Global North and South, as well as between present and future generations (Demaria, Schneider, Sekulova, & Martinez-Alier, 2013).

6 Several examples confirm this. Atomization is an essential process in the modern manufacture of ceramics and derives from the agri-food and pharmaceuticals sectors. It can be described as a horizontal innovation that has transferred across sectors due to the proximity of agents. This applies also to continuous kiln ceramic production, which originated in biscuit manufacture.