Tensions in co-evolutionary processes: Three Swedish seed organizations in the 20th century

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of which societal actors have the capability and willingness to finance and organize search processes, in order to introduce commercial innovations, over a longer time period. The long-term development of agriculture depends upon innovations within a variety of technologies, markets, organizational forms as well in the seeds themselves. This involves points of tensions between continuity and change as well as co-evolutionary processes organized around the innovation processes. This article explores the tensions between continuity and change, by focusing on three dimensions, namely: (1) regional location versus global interactions; (2) static specialization versus experimentation in knowledge and products; and (3) relative success versus failure. The historical development of three Swedish agricultural seed organizations, Hilleshög, Svalöf and Weibulls, during the 20th century, provides an empirical probe within which to address the more fundamental theoretical problems.

Keywords:

• Innovation systems
• Agricultural seeds
• Hilleshög
• Svalöf
• Weibulls
• Regions
• Globalization

Acknowledgements

This research was founded by a VINNOVA grant on ‘Dynamics of BioScience’ and a strategic grant from Chalmers University of Technology. Comments from Brian Wixted and from reviewers were useful in the revisions. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹The purpose of this article is thus not to compile a list of factors which explain why these particular Swedish seed firms survived, and hence can be called successful. Methodologically, trying to say something about the ones which survived requires knowing about the ones which failed. Following Metcalfe (1998), survival should be seen as coping, despite not being the absolutely best. Given the interest in the interactions between organizational survival, innovation strategy and environmental conditions, this article will ignore the multitude of literature which claims to have uncovered the success and failure formula, based on internal characteristics of specific companies.

²They do so by arguing that firms, and especially large multinational firms, tend to have rather stable technological specializations, and that this enduring specialization helps explain why a national economy is specialized.

³The reason is that changing boundaries may be one organizational strategy to respond to environmental pressures—and hence in this example, something to take into consideration rather than to abstract away from specialization of production and innovation remains fairly stable over time.

⁴Weibulls also produced garden seeds but this side of their business is not explicitly considered in this article.

⁵The main references are Hilleshögs (1990), Svalöf (1990, 1991), Weibulls (1990), Moberg (1998), SOU (1997), Weibull (1997) as well as a variety of popular articles and secondary material. See also McKelvey (2004a, b) for a more detailed empirical case study as well as a specific discussion about appropriability and innovation opportunity in these cases and in the seed business more generally.

⁶Rich farmers often lay behind the formation of the organizations able to invest resources in innovation as opposed to the poorer areas, where starvation and emigration were more common.

⁷See Granstrand and Alänge (1995) for the evolution and role of corporate entrepreneurship in Sweden.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maureen Mckelvey

E-mail: [email protected]