Proximity and modes of innovation – evidence from two agricultural engineering industries in north-west Germany

ABSTRACT

Recently, policymakers realized the important role of traditional industries for regional development. However, traditional policies of the last decades mainly focussed on science-intensive high-tech industries. Therefore, it is important to understand, how traditional industries innovate and renew themselves. One of the most notable recent strands of literature distinguishing between the characteristics of high- and low-tech industries is the one on modes of innovation. However, another very important approach related to innovation and regional development, the proximity literature, has only partly discussed in relation to innovation modes. This paper seeks to contribute to this issue by focussing on two traditional agricultural engineering industries from north-western Germany that experienced processes of renewal in the first years of the twenty-first century. It is shown that these industries followed very different developments and utilized different forms of proximities in this process in very specific ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Modes of innovation
• proximity
• STI
• DUI
• CCI
• agricultural engineering

Acknowledgements

The author thanks all interview partners for participating in the study. Furthermore, he thanks two anonymous referees for their comments that helped to improve this paper a lot. An earlier version of this work was presented at the IINO seminar in Bremen 2015. The author thanks the participants of this seminar for fruitful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Dominik Santner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3330-9894

Notes

1. The addressed topics include general information on the interviewee and the firm; targeted markets; products and services provided by the firm; the general development of the company; the role of specific events on the firm’s development; skills and recruitment of specialized staff; the way how innovation is generally conducted by the firm; recent and future product and service innovation; the quality of the innovations (incremental, new to the firm or new to the market); the relationship to customers, suppliers, competitors, research organizations and other agents and their roles for the firm’s innovation activities; the role of policy; financing of innovation activities; membership in networks and interest organizations; perception of the development of the own industry in general and within the own regional context.

2. Claas produces tractors at other sites.

3. Another official acronym is CCI which is not used in this paper due to the risk for confusion with the combined and complex mode of innovation (CCI).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number HA 3179/6-1] and European Science Foundation [grant number 10-ECRP-07].