ABSTRACT
Border regions are not often associated with innovation and economic prosperity. And even when they are prosperous, cross-border interaction is still mostly limited. The opening up of borders in Europe has presented new opportunities for firms located in these border regions to co-operate for innovation and knowledge to flow across borders. Despite the reduction of the importance of borders, firms seeking to access cross-border knowledge resources need still to ‘cross’ the border and address the various effects it brings. This paper therefore asks the question of how the presence of a border affects the processes by which firms attempt to build up productive co-operations for innovation. We use a heuristic of collaborative innovation across borders as building up through four sequential cooperation stages, and each of these different stages is susceptible to different kinds of border effects. Using a case study of firms co-operating across the Dutch-Flemish border, we empirically explore these border crossing processes in order to shed further light on how border processes play out.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Jos van den Broek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9754-1206