Rethinking peripheral geographies of innovation: towards an ordinary periphery approach

ABSTRACT

Thinking through and with the Caucasus, I provide reflections on the role of entrepreneurial innovation in peripheral regions. I distinguish between three approaches to investigate firms’ innovation practices in peripheral geographies: a) knowledge-centric approaches based on the geography of innovation literature, b) surplus value-centric world-systems approaches, and c) in acknowledgment and contradistinction to both, the contours of an ordinary periphery approach to innovation that this article develops. The article shows the strengths and weaknesses of the first two approaches and argues that future research on “peripheral” innovation would benefit from a broader conception of knowledge and re/production as central entry points of inquiry. This is paramount to evade the normative appeal of the capitalist Global North city as the yardstick of economic development, inherently present in the first two approaches. Such an ordinary periphery perspective calls for a research agenda putting the negotiation of surviving well together center stage, thus opening up more diverse perspectives on knowledge and re/production.

KEYWORDS:

• Peripheral innovation
• diverse economies
• ordinary cities
• world-systems

Introduction

The paper addresses the question what is at stake when contemplating the possibilities of innovation in the periphery and who benefits from peripheral innovation activities? So far, the nascent geographical literature on peripheral innovation is primarily a geography of knowledge creation. In this sense, the similarities with an agglomeration-centered geography of innovation, which it seeks to complicate, are strikingly similar. Most analyses so far focus on how knowledge can be created either despite peripherality (periphery-as-lack) through pipelines or differently conceived extra-local networks or due to peripherality (periphery-as-asset) (Glückler, Shearmur, and Martinus 2023 for a similar distinction). In contradistinction to both approaches, I offer an alternative research program to study innovations in “peripheries”, addressing the four problems that Pugh and Dubois (2021) associate with research on peripheries (fuzzy language; negative stereotyping; lack of relationality; lack of addressing intersectional inequalities). The paper calls the contours of this new research program the “ordinary periphery” that attempts to conceive the geographies of peripheral innovation in a more holistic sense. The ordinary periphery approach seeks to address questions beyond knowledge creation by placing collective “surviving well together” (McKinnon, Stephen, and Kelly 2019) center stage, building on diverse economies scholarship. Rather than aligning the periphery to the core, I ponder the openings of presenting the ordinary periphery – here playing with both world-systems and Robinson’s (2006) connotations regarding a similar phenomenon – as a field of experimentation that problematizes the coloniality of the core. In this reading, periphery is not to be understood as “places that don’t matter” except on the ballot (Rodríguez-Pose 2018) but as exciting, yet “ordinary” avenues for diverse economic practices (Gibson-Graham 2008; Robinson 2006) of innovation and transformation. When using the term “periphery”, the approach is not suggesting a distance to a metropole but is inspired by world-systems analysis that advances a definition of peripherality that is more coherent and centers on the more pertinent theoretical and methodological issue: re/production. At the same time, I seek to problematize the analytical confinement to view (uneven) economic development mainly through the prism of (exchange and surplus) value, thus naturalizing the capitalist company that it elsewhere seeks to dismantle.

The ordinary periphery research program suggests letting go the idea of the “capitalist Global North city” as the (un)desirable yardstick against which all economic activity should be compared and accordingly organized. Therefore, what is at stake is not only challenging city-centric readings of innovation but moreover its capitalocentric and developmentalist overtones (Escobar 2018; Gibson-Graham 1996). Beyond the need to scrutinize proprietary and distributive issues around innovation, the ordinary periphery asks questions about the quality of socio-material relations with more-than-human communities (issues of re/production) that innovations can foster.

This ordinary periphery program is inspired by thinking peripheral innovation through and with post-Soviet peripheries, especially Armenia and Georgia. Since Soviet dissolution, post-socialist peripheralized places attract attention primarily as (negative) examples to study agricultural transformation, land use change and property rights (Kay, Shubin, and Thelen 2012, 55). In many critical literatures, they figure as places of bare survival and post-industrial decline either being disconnected from, or implicated in, transnational extractivist networks (Sgibnev and Turaeva 2023). Next to studies of resistances in peripheralized settings (Antadze and Gujaraidze 2021; Ishkanian 2016; Rekhviashvili 2021), more hopeful accounts begin to gain traction, too (Cima and Sovová 2022).

This article spins further the role that innovation and entrepreneurialism can play in peripheral projects of “surviving well together”. Yet, reading through the literature that appears as the most serious contender for understanding what and how to study innovation in the periphery – the peripheral innovation literature in particular – does not provide convincing answers. This article delineates the journey from an initial engagement with peripheral innovation (section 2) via world-systems theory carving out what each of them highlights (section 3) but also omits (section 4). I furthermore complicate both approaches via diverse economies scholarship and social and frugal innovation debates in order to arrive at the contours of the ordinary periphery approach (section 5). Eventually, I sketch out implications by revisiting innovation in Armenia and Georgia (section 6) before revisiting venues for future research (section 7). While I develop the approach to make sense of the innovative practices of Armenian and Georgian enterprises, this research can inspire research in other peripheralized places as well. Theoretical deliberations, partly underpinned by empirical observations from secondary literature on Eurasia, guide this engagement.

The conceptual challenge of the ordinary periphery approach is that it is impossible to identify and examine innovative enterprises in the periphery without predefined notions of both “innovation” and the “periphery”, whereas a diverse economies approach prescribes conceptual openness rather than preliminary theoretical closure. At the same time, it needs acknowledgment that both terms are currently hegemonized in a capitalocentric fashion. Collapsing the subordination of peripheries to cores, the article provides insights for scholars and practitioners who are interested in studying innovative enterprises beyond peripheries as well.

The geographies of peripheral innovation and the quest to decenter agglomerations

The geographies of peripheral innovation literature departs from, and seek to complicate, an overarching “geographies of innovation” literature. Suffice to say that the peripheral innovation literature is at best a collective term for a variety of different approaches and understandings of periphery and innovation. Not exploring the literature in all its nuances and internal heterogeneity – for which Eder (2019) provides a recent overview – I will confine myself to the most dominant contours of these approaches. Following others (Eder 2019; Shearmur 2012), this engagement addresses mainly enterprise innovation in peripheral areas although I will later show the advantages of seeking inspiration from other fields.

The necessity to probe into peripheral innovation is deemed crucial as the geographies of innovation operate under an urban bias that the peripheral innovation literature deems obfuscating (Shearmur 2019). The peripheral innovation literature thus takes pains with the idea of peripheral innovation as an alleged oxymoron and seeks to displace Territorial Innovation Models (TIMs) that come under a variety of forms, from clusters to regional and national innovation systems (RIS/NIS) to learning regions and agglomeration economies (Crevoisier 2014; Moulaert and Sekia 2003). NISs (Ivaniashvili-Orbeliani 2009; Poghosyan 2017), RISs (Maridashvili and Meparishvili 2018) and clusters (Gechbaia and Kharaishvili 2011) are predominant approaches in Armenia and Georgia, with their analytical potency and normative desirability usually taken for granted, and subsequently applied to the respective territorial units. The result is often a discourse of lack, deficiency and, to some extent, observable catch-up development.

With geographical considerations predominant, the peripheral innovation literature evokes as peripheries a whole spectrum between Norwegian fishing villages and large cities at the edge of the European Union (Eder 2019).¹ A firm-centered analysis is promising on a theoretical and methodological level. If innovation were indeed an urban or otherwise territorialized phenomenon, then a firm-centered analysis would ultimately corroborate that assertion. If, reversely, the methodological entry point of firm-centered analysis does not produce such causations, then the presupposition of territorialized container spaces hosting the most important elements for knowledge creation trajectories must be challenged. Moreover, alternative conceptions of innovation can inductively emerge from a firm-centered analysis.

Yet, the criticism toward New Economic Geography and New Regionalism literature, which is that they “focus exclusively on a few successful “super-star” regions and cities’ and ‘neglect all other “ordinary” places” (Hadjimichalis and Hudson 2014, 213) can be adapted to peripheral innovation approaches. This is because the peripheral innovation literature, too, tends to focus on “successful peripheries” (Eder 2019, 134) – mostly of the Global North – in which “success” is implicitly equated in capitalist terms as the ability to compete in the global economy. More systematic, comparative and quantitatively informed firm-based studies in Norway, Germany and Quebec suggest that peripheral firm innovation is possible outside of large agglomerations (Fitjar and Huber 2015; Shearmur 2015; Shearmur and Doloreux 2016; Vonnahme and Lang 2017). Moreover, comparative studies that systematically differentiate between peripheries and agglomerations are arguably not exhausted to claim that agglomerations are the natural habitat of innovation (Vonnahme and Lang 2017). In decentering the agglomeration-innovation nexus, the peripheral literature benefits from intellectual currents that destabilize a patent- or Research & Development-centric definition of knowledge. The importance of university-firm linkages and the analysis of patents often employed in innovation research suggests a peculiar type of innovation (Shearmur 2012), closely related to Science & Technology modes of innovation (STI). Survey-based research is more agnostic in this regard. Managers decide whether they introduce new services, goods (Fitjar, Huber, and Rodríguez-Pose 2016) but also process innovations (Vonnahme and Lang 2019) to the firm or market.

“Global pipelines” (Bathelt, Malmberg, and Maskell 2004) and non-geographical forms of “proximity” (Boschma 2005) play a crucial role in conceptualizing peripheral innovation. Such studies often suggest that peripherality is something that needs to be overcome, resulting in a lack-based model of explanation. Yet, peripheries are not only lacking vis-à-vis agglomerations, but that they also offer peculiar assets (Graffenberger and Vonnahme 2019). While agglomerations are more conducive to “fast” innovations that require constant interactions, “slow” innovators are overrepresented in peripheral locations (Shearmur 2015; Shearmur and Doloreux 2016). Embedded personal relationships might be a peculiar asset in peripheries. As a result, the periphery-as-lack model is increasingly superseded with a periphery-as-asset model that embraces the slow innovation argument (Mayer 2020) and highlights the promises of experimentation and (temporal) geographical distance for creativity and knowledge creation (Hautala 2015).

In these approaches, however, the investigation of innovation is mostly confined to the issue of knowledge creation and circulation. Therefore, it often elides the question who benefits from innovation. While our understanding about pipelines, archipelago economies and knowledge networks is rapidly proliferating in Northern contexts, we lack an understanding who appropriates which kind of knowledge and transforms them into value flows and livelihood outcomes under which kind of conditions. Therefore, the pro-innovation bias (Godin and Vinck 2017) is not seriously addressed so far. Answers to why innovation is desirable range from increasing competitiveness, tackling depopulation or creating employment (Eder 2019). More efforts in this direction are indispensable to sustain an engaged pluralism on the meaning of peripheral innovation and its linkage to an overall conceptualization of collective well-being.

Critics have questioned the instrumental market logic underpinning TIMs (Moulaert and Sekia 2003). Rather than addressing this contention, the peripheral innovation literature largely adopted an uncritical stance toward innovation, growth and competitiveness. Survey-based research provides for a ground in which the opinion of the companies is taken seriously and thus refrains from the epistemological violence of denying, and the perhaps limited effect of (re-)claiming, some forms of economic activity as innovative. However, this does not automatically translate into making innovation a project that is compatible with building economies of well-being. While there is no engagement with pipeline-informed “peripheral innovation” approaches in Armenia and Georgia and the post-socialist space in general, the TIM-related literature coincides with many peripheral innovation approaches when it conceives innovation as a tool to foster competitiveness in the global economy.

Innovation and peripherality from a world-systems perspective

While many peripheral innovation approaches define the periphery as an outside of agglomeration, world systems-approaches help to problematize the content of, and relationship between, innovation and the periphery. With world-systems approaches, I refer to world-systems analysis as such as well as the more geographically informed world city network and global city approaches, on the one hand, and global commodity chain (GCC), global value chain (GVC), and global production network (GPN) approaches, on the other hand.

World-systems analysis highlights that capitalism – as a so-called world-system comprised a single division of labor with multiple political centers (Wallerstein 2006) – cannot be sufficiently understood without the core-periphery distinction that is central to its functioning. The very idea of a periphery is not geographical but functional and refers to the degree of profitability within the global division of labor (Wallerstein 2006, 27). According to world-systems analysis, cores are defined by high profitability, while peripheries are defined by low profitability and not, as some critics charge, by innovation or location (Glückler, Shearmur, and Martinus 2023). In this sense, the periphery must not but can be – and indeed often is – synonymous with non-agglomerations. Commodity chains (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986) help to understand how some companies (core) extract surplus value from other companies (periphery) in a process that is called unequal exchange. In other words, exploitation does not only occur within enterprises but also between them.

World-systems approaches deem innovation a crucial mechanism that enables enterprises and regions to deperipheralize. World-systems approaches foster a discussion between knowledge, on the one hand, and value flows, on the other hand. Wallerstein puts overt emphasis on patents and radical innovation as an entry barrier to secure a quasi-monopolistic position (insulating a company from competitors) given the focus on global processes in the longue durée (Wallerstein 2006).

In GVC analysis, the process of functional core-ization is called upgrading, associated with higher rates of profitability, i.e. rent, compared to previously performed activities within the chain (cf. Humphrey and Schmitz 2002). Simultaneously, upgrading divorces itself from radical innovation understandings. Upgrading is a more relational concept vis-à-vis innovation. It is defined by the position of a given firm and product among co-evolving participants (including collaborators and competitors) in a dynamic network. To the extent that “the rate of innovation is lower than that of competitors, this may result in declining value added and market shares” (Kaplinsky and Morris 2001, 37). Such a conception allows to scrutinize the possible relational downgradings occurring elsewhere and thus to analytically integrate functionally peripheral producers and their communities who might quite literally pay the price for innovation occurring at the other end of the profitability chain. “Missing links” and “dark places” of exploitation that firms might invisibilize through dissociation practices (Ibert et al. 2019) can be thus examined, destabilizing the boundaries between production and reproduction (Dunaway 2014).

World-systems analysis offers a critique to the assumption that pathways of innovation, and thus profitability and de-peripheralization, are available to all in a capitalist world-system. The former reading is conducive to the idea that innovation-induced capitalist development can be ubiquitous once the right institutions are in place or the appropriate knowledge networks leveraged. Subsequently, it might contribute to invisibilizing structural inequalities or the (relational) dark places of innovation while producing success stories in some peculiar places, firms and regions from the vantage point of a developmentalist vocabulary. Actors in the capitalist world-system constantly reconfigure the topography of core-periphery relations precisely due to their innovation activities (cf. O’Hearn 1994). In this sense, the language of peripheralization as a relational, multidimensional, multiscalar and temporal process (Kühn 2015) is more appropriate vis-à-vis static notions of periphery as inevitable condition. Yet, the analytical core-periphery distinction can be helpful in foregrounding the conditions under which the operations of some companies and regions often flourish to the detriment of others under the specific structural, institutional, ideological and symbolical conditions of the capitalist world-system or its “variegated” forms (Peck and Theodore 2007).

Wallerstein postulates that “for shorthand purposes we can talk of core states and peripheral states” but immediately qualifies this assertion by stressing “so long as we remember that we are really talking of a relationship between production processes” (Wallerstein 2006, 28). This leads us to the appreciation of periphery as a networked phenomenon and the discontents with state-centrism.

Recent conceptual advancements in the world and global city literature and the attempt to integrate this literature with GCC/GVC/GPN approaches based on their partial world-systems origins (Brown et al. 2010) show that cleavages in the capitalist world-system do not run along a simplified state-centric Global North vs. Rest dichotomy. Rather, they run across a complex matrix of hierarchically and functionally differentiated cities (Ben and Taylor 2020; Parnreiter 2019), firms and regions (Coe et al. 2004) through which value is transferred. From a world-systems perspective, many cases under investigation in the peripheral innovation literature might hardly qualify as “peripheral” in either a more state-centric or networked understanding.

“Peripheral innovation” can learn three crucial lessons from world-systems approaches concerning the centrality of core-periphery relations. First, it needs to address what a periphery is and needs to account for the geographical applicability of its definitions. Only then, it makes sense to discuss what is to be done in the periphery. Most peripheral innovation studies are still confined to the Global North and it is doubtful to what extent these discussions can be generalized.

A networked, nested, relational and functional understanding of periphery, while still hosting an insurmountable diversity of places that defy any unified metanarrative about peripherality, offers a starting point for articulating new projects of well-being.² For shorthand purposes, we can likewise state that countries like Russia inhibit a semi-peripheral position in the capitalist world-system (Morozov 2015) while countries like Armenia and Georgia but also some Central Asian and Southeast European countries can be regarded as peripheral (Müller 2018). Both Armenia and Georgia enjoyed a relatively privileged economic position within the Soviet Union, only to be devastated socio-economically by the joint effects of shock therapy and ethnonationalist conflict in the process of gaining their independence, necessitating an approach to the economy that includes more than economic factors as well (Gevorkyan 2018). Gevorkyan’s assessment that “the long awaited post-socialist macroeconomic miracle has remained just that, a miracle that is yet to materialize” (Gevorkyan 2018, 10) is thus particularly relevant in Armenia and Georgia. Emergent research on GVC furthermore suggests a predominance of peripheral low-valuing adding activities in the Caucasus (Babych, Keshelava, and Mzhavanadze 2020). On closer inspection, advanced producer services in post-socialist metropolitan cities stand out, however, as archipelago-style nodes of wealth creation and transfer in world city networks (Ni et al. 2010). Donor-mediated innovation support of potentially high value adding activities in Armenia and Georgia is geared toward the metropolitan cities (Sattler and Stephan 2023). The result of shock therapy and ethnonationalist conflict is the sharp exacerbation of spatial and socio-economic inequalities in cities like Tbilisi or Yerevan (Salukvadze and Sichinava 2019). Thus, a relational understanding of core-peripherality directs our attention away from absolute and strictly territorialized geographies (e.g. of the “rural” or “Armenia”) to relational geographies of interconnection.

Second, and closely related, does the knowledge-centric “pipelines” or “archipelago” option, considered the preferred or even only viable option for peripheries (Rodríguez-Pose and Fitjar 2013), provide a convincing answer to the question of who benefits from knowledge creation? Re/productive approaches touch a sore spot by asserting that the pipeline-related literatures “focus mostly on dyadic inter-organizational knowledge and information flows and do not examine economic transactions and value transformation within and between firms in production networks” (Yeung 2021, 997). Shortly, peripheral innovation approaches fail to establish the link between knowledge, on the one hand, and value creation and re/production, on the other hand. The knowledge-centrism, on which it is premised, disregards the production process, and risks to articulate success stories without interrogating their relational connection to other places of re/production.

Third, the emphasis on up-/downgrading as relational processes can problematize the knowledge-centric solutions as suggested by the peripheral innovation literature. Is the real problem for peripheries to “act in order to remain competitive and, ultimately, survive” (Rodríguez-Pose and Fitjar 2013, 370)? Does such an approach re-inscribe capitalist competition as the naturalized driving force of our economy? If companies, places or regions move up the ladder of competition, does this really tackle the problem of “peripherality” as such or does it rather geographically re-configure it in a dialectical zero-sum game of up-/downgrading?

Yet, differences between peripheral and world-systems approaches should not be overstressed. Most world and global cities are larger cities (Taylor 2004). The finding can be accommodated by the fast innovation-agglomeration thesis in so far as for advanced producer services “[t]here were good ‘cluster’ reasons for such concentration, as the firms operating in these services require information-rich environs to keep ahead in their business” (Brown et al. 2010, 14). Moreover, GVC recently explores the role of non-territorialized innovation systems (Pietrobelli and Rabellotti 2011) while GPN stresses extra-regional dimensions in knowledge production (Coe et al. 2004). Yet, the more crucial point is that even such an integrative account would be incomplete without investigating the normative desirability regarding innovation, on the one hand, and the “capitalist Global North city”, on the other hand.

The capitalist global north city and its discontents

In this section, I will spell out the discontents to world-systems approaches as a first step to carve out elements of an ordinary periphery approach. My central contention is that world-systems advances a robust definition of peripherality but like the peripheral innovation literature provides no satisfying answers to the question “what is to be done in the periphery”. Can peripheral innovation play an important role to shift the focus from competitiveness to something broader? If so, can this be achieved when leaving the main coordinates of the capitalist world-system untouched by subscribing to affirmative or critical, but nonetheless capitalocentric, readings of peripheral innovation?

One solution lies in becoming like the core and to relegate the core to a subordinate position. This is the option currently preferred in the growth-centered developmentalist literature. A second path, taken here, proceeds via deconstruction and reconstruction, via unlearning what the core teaches as a precondition to (re)learn innovation. Seen in this light, peripheral innovation has the potential to challenge the paradigm set by the core instead of imagining itself as a research area in which catch-up development is examined.

Geographical knowledge production for a long time championed the Northern city as a privileged site of innovation and growth. This particular capitalist Global North city-centric recipe is epitomized in the assessment that

the most fundamental issues for developing countries today is how to create and sustain the kinds of agglomerations without which they can never hope for entry into the highest ranks of the global economy, while ensuring that income disparities remain well within the limits of the socially just and politically tolerable. (Scott and Storper 2003, 589)

The “knife-edge dilemma” (Scott and Storper 2003, 588) cannot be solved. The blueprint for development – here the “highest ranks of the global economy” – lies in the capitalist agglomeration as already-existent in both the Global North and increasingly in some world cities of the Global South, while the remaining periphery can only hope to either emulate the path toward agglomeration economies or must be provided with redistributive measures. Thus, the networked capitalist city originating in the Global North – despite its centrality to creating socio-spatial inequalities in the first place – functions as the benchmark against which competing imaginaries can be assessed and compared. Correspondingly, Taylor (2004, 48) fearfully constructs “the opposite end of the world-economy’s wealth creation spectrum: bypassed places, regions that have lost their cities and city ties or have never historically developed them. This is the world of subsistence economies, the rural backwaters of the Third World.”

GCC/GVC/GPN similarly operate under a critical or affirmative, but nonetheless capitalocentric, vision of development. Presupposing that all actors seek to increase their share of value as their main objective, many scholars and even more so practitioners of GVC often seek for innovation-induced upgrading (Humphrey and Schmitz 2002; OECD 2013), while GPN advocates see their task in analyzing firm-centered “value capture trajectories” (Coe 2021; Coe and Yeung 2015). What these perspectives sometimes affirmatively take for granted as a universal form of success can be rather conceived as a timespace-dependent and deconstructable practice and understanding of value (as price or “value-added”). High value-adding production, however, is compatible with the worst forms of paid exploitation and unpaid appropriation and undermines the self-proclaimed ambition “to refocus attention on the social circumstances under which commodities are produced” (Henderson et al. 2002, 444). Social and environmental upgrading appear as subordinated but desirable by-products.

But even a critical grounding in “uneven development” only helps us to excavate how peripheral regions are exploited via the geographical transfer, or even destruction, of value and re/productive habitats, but provides us with limited ideas what the periphery can reasonably hope for. A good portion of skepticism is appropriate to question whether value capture leads to desirable development outcomes, given that too quickly both class politics (which groups exactly gain from firm-centered value capture?) and larger re/productive questions are analytically lost (who survives well under which conditions?). Oppositional movements – not enterprises – are analytically privileged to construct less exploitative worlds in a hegemonic field (Levy, Reinecke, and Manning 2016), thus buttressing the enterprise as a capitalist “Other”. Finally, peripheral innovation approaches in their ambition to decenter TIMs are nonetheless allured by the promises of capitalist development. While the Northern agglomeration is dethroned from being the only source of innovation, its normative appeal as a growth pole returns it to the analysis. Whereas the conversation between rather production-centric and knowledge-centric approaches gains traction (Boschma 2022; Yeung 2021), this discussion largely operates under a universalist development discourse.

Towards an ordinary periphery research program

What would happen if we associated knowledge creation with its assumed functions and effects? In this section, I touch upon the openings if we employed a more post-development attuned vocabulary (first subsection), a less capitalocentric approach to what counts as knowledge (second subsection), a re-consideration what role re/production can play therein (third subsection), followed by a proposal to theorize the link between knowledge and re/production practices from a weak theory (fourth subsection).

From innovation/universal development to innovation/pluriversal post-development

I suggest to reconsider the ultimate goal of innovation to lie in a context-dependent understanding of collective and relational well-being. To underline the multiplicity of organizational, institutional and socio-ecological pathways to collective well-being, post-development scholarship introduces the concept “pluriverse” (Esteva and Escobar 2017) to deliberately depart from more “universal” markers of well-being, e.g. value capture.

For reconstructing such a more pluriversal understanding of well-being, the ordinary periphery approach recovers the diverse economy aspect in Robinson’s 2006 employment of the concept “ordinary” that became less accentuated in urban (and often not exactly peripheral) research focusing on post-socialist settings. The decentering of world cities allowed scholars of post-socialism to a) place Eurasian cities as relevant theory-generating sites and b) open comparisons to other cities and contexts (Hilbrandt, Alves, and Tuvikene 2017; Kinossian 2022; Wiest 2013). Yet, to think about the “ordinary” involves also a commitment to theorize such localities based on a more holistic understanding of a diverse economy (Robinson 2006), when world-systems approaches rather highlight their function for capitalism, e.g. as export-processing zones. This means to appreciate peripheralized places as “acting peripheries” (Görmar and Lang 2019) with their own distinctive diverse economic practices – a particularly pertinent omission in research on passively rendered post-socialist peripheries (Kay, Shubin, and Thelen 2012) but to some extent also in post-socialist urban research (Ferenčuhová 2016). Although Robinson’s approach problematizes universalist developmentalism, it still views diverse economies as means to foster (more equitable) growth. I draw on diverse economies scholarship to further decenter growth-centered development thinking. In this post-development attuned scholarship, well-being is conceptualized as context-dependent “surviving well together” in manifold ecologies based on diverse economic practices (Gibson-Graham, Hill, and Law 2016). In this well-being conception, we identify elements of re/production (“surviving”), context-dependent understandings of its quality (“well”) but also a relational analytic that indicates responsiveness to injustices (“together”).

There are no clear-cut recipes for surviving well together. Rather, diverse economies scholarship calls for a weak theory that “involves refusing to extend explanation too widely or deeply, refusing to know too much” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 619). It is one of the few post-development approaches arguing that entrepreneurial activity can contribute to flourishing livelihoods on the planet (Gibson-Graham et al. 2019). At the same time, it does not relegate the quest for constructing more livable worlds primarily to the formal economy alone (such as Community Wealth Building) or to only some sectors (such as Universal Basic Services; Foundational Economy).

How can we conceptualize the link between surviving well together and enterprises in the light of a weak theory? In its relation to enterprises, diverse economies fosters versions of entrepreneurialism that are compatible with quests for increasing autonomy (Naylor 2019) or pathways to degrowth (Johanisova, Crabtree, and Fraňková 2013; Schmid 2020). Moreover, diverse economies embeds enterprises not only in “capitalism”, its “varieties”, or in its “network” – usually a very human-centered one –, but in the wider web of life and in manifold non-economic relations (Community Economies Collective 2019; Gibson-Graham, Hill, and Law 2016). In this regard, it joins efforts to incorporate invisibilized re/productive work by suppliers, subsistence farmers and nature as an integral part of entrepreneurial production (Moore 2015). Moreover, diverse economies does not privilege scale: international businesses or export-oriented enterprises – which received scholarly attention in the post-socialist space (Demirbag and Wood 2018; Gevorkyan 2015; Makhmadshoev, Ibeh, and Crone 2015) – can be deemed as successful as more locally rooted and operating enterprises. Studies analyzing enterprises from a diverse economies perspective are rare in post-socialist peripheralized settings (for exceptions cf. Cima 2020; Johanisova, Sovová, and Fraňková 2020) and so far have focused on cooperatives and eco-social enterprises, emphasizing a) practices of mutuality and reciprocity b) democratic decision-making and appropriation of surpluses c) non-market production, exchange and provisioning practices and d) profits, to the extent that they exist, as a means to replenish communities. In a post-development reading, peripherality is a critical condition, not only because of the associated low profitability (as this would re-inscribe universal development) but because of the social exploitation, environmental destruction and “ontological occupation” (Escobar 2018, 67) that it involves. Ontological occupation appears visible when governments in Armenia and Georgia, in conjuncture with international organizations, establish innovation grant programs that are decidedly tailored toward a capitalocentric developmentalist logic (Sattler and Stephan 2023). Distributional questions and struggles with regard to being positioned in the lower edges of profitability must be taken seriously, e.g. in the global fertility chain for transnational surrogacy (Vertommen, Pavone, and Nahman 2022), as business process outsourcing locations for the Northern gambling industry (OC Media 2019), or as raw material suppliers for Northern industries (Pomieciński 2023).

Yet, focusing on innovation/upgrading in such chains alone disregards questions of surviving well together, e.g. conditions of work, quality of bonds between chain participants, the use value of gambling, or the socio-ecological havoc of mining. While seeking to integrate the relationality of peripheral innovation and world-systems approaches, it is also imperative to examine the quality of socio-material relations, the relational effects of innovation, and the struggles for surviving well together, that both exchange/surplus value-centered and knowledge creation-centered investigations so far either obliterate or neglect.

Decentering knowledge practices and innovation

If a growth-related definition of development becomes problematized, then this also has ramifications for what counts as innovation and knowledge. In a world-systems and peripheral innovation approach, knowledge is valued in so far as it translates into exchange and surplus value (e.g. upgrading) or increasing global competitiveness. What does it mean to link knowledge to an overarching goal of surviving well together? The emphasis will not rest on certain preconditions that might be entirely absent or hard to establish (institutions, organizations and network linkages) to build “pipelines”. Only in a capitalocentric reading, the distinction between thick and thin RIS (but also NIS) makes entirely sense (Trippl, Grillitsch, and Isaksen 2017), including the search for exogenous sources of knowledge in thin RIS to counteract their “lack” in regional assets.

The ordinary periphery transcends models that seek to identify deficiencies and lacks vis-à-vis a certain imagined standard. Rather, the ordinary periphery draws inspiration about knowledge/innovation from frugal innovation discourses such as Indian jugaad (Ananthram and Chan 2019; Navi, Prabhu, and Ahuja 2012) or Brazilian gambiarra (Busch 2021; Messias and Mussa 2020) but also social innovation literatures. While especially jugaad scholarship researches these innovations in the context of competitiveness and growth-oriented regimes, frugal aspects in gambiarra and jugaad, can highlight the importance of surviving well together: Most importantly, the centrality of knowledge in this literature switches to solving (community, ecological) problems instead of employing knowledge as a means to capture value for accumulation’s sake. The frugal innovation literature stresses knowledge creation with existing assets but does not deny exogenous knowledge tapping to play a role. Such an asset-based approach can be well connected to diverse economies scholarship (Hwang 2020; Mathie, Cameron, and Gibson 2017), and some peripheral innovation approaches that refuse viewing peripherality in all-too negative terms, which is a common pitfall in world-systems approaches. Yet, this asset-based approach must avoid importing a (Northern and capitalocentric) standard as the yardstick.

This resembles the argument by Moulaert et al. (2005, 1976) who argue that social innovation shall circle around the “satisfaction of human needs” (content/product dimension), “changes in social relations” (governance and thus process dimension) and “increasing the socio-political capability and access to resources” (empowerment dimension). A diverse economies perspective would only add a more ecology-centered perspective that addresses the needs, wants, and desires of more-than-human community re/production. Thus, ordinary periphery destabilizes distinctions between exchange value-centered enterprise innovation, on the one hand, and social and frugal innovation, on the other hand.

A post-development approach similarly re-reads the employment of technology “from the perspective of local autonomy, subordinating science and technology to buen vivir” – a more Latin American-attuned version of surviving well together – and thus contributing “to strengthening the convivial fabric of life” (Escobar 2018, 211). Appreciating the multiplicity of how knowledge and innovations can be enrolled in different onto-epistemic projects, we are able to discuss the ethico-political choices involved in adopting, negotiating, appropriating and rejecting some forms of exogenous knowledge. Eventually, this operation also decouples more forcefully the notion of knowledge (intensity) from its standard reference: exchange and surplus value.

Decentering re/production practices

Similar to world-systems approaches, diverse economies scholarship reserves a central place for value and re/production in its analysis of enterprises but introduces some crucial nuances. The most important one is methodological: while world-systems approaches are often pre-occupied by the enterprise as central units of analysis in the sphere of production, diverse economies argues that the enterprise is deeply entrenched in a reproductive politics in the web of life. While world-systems approach highlights (surplus) value transfer and capture, diverse economies politicizes the distinction between necessary and surplus labor for a project that on the one hand emphasizes what is needed to “survive” (necessary), and thus is used for reproduction, and what can be distributed (surplus), especially to the commonweal or to secure an enterprise against future risks. Lately, diverse economies incorporated the concept of sufficiency to further destabilize traditional Marxian conceptions of necessity and surplus (Miller 2013), by differentiating what is needed for bare survival (necessity), what is needed for surviving well together with others (sufficiency), and what remains for wealth distribution (surplus). Sufficiency entails awareness about the quality of re/productive relations that underpin the value creation process, thus placing interdependency prominently. Beyond examining the conditions of the reproduction of industrial labor, it calls thus for sensitivity regarding the labor and reproduction of all life forms that are relationally connected to enterprises.

Decentering the exchange and surplus aspects of re/production benefits from including use value aspects into the analysis. Can enterprises produce things that can be used for satisfying less alienated needs as discussed in the social innovation literature (Moulaert et al. 2005)? Can our more-than-human production process of use values, often premised upon the unpaid appropriation of the web of life (Moore 2015), also satisfy the reproductive sufficiency needs of other life forms? Diverse economies recognizes that non-human labor is not only work for us or for capitalism (as the ecosystem services discourse suggests) but crucially sustains the web of life (Barron and Hess 2020) that enterprises co-inhabit.

Thus, the ordinary periphery program visibilizes innovative practices by enterprises that value and appropriate diverse forms of labor in an ecologically sustainable – extraction does not exceed regenerative capacities – and socio-spatially just manner while satisfying community desires for well-being.

Linking knowledge and re/production as negotiations

How to theorize the intersection of knowledge and re/production? What can be adopted from the peripheral innovation and world-systems literature and what needs to be rectified? Geographically tracing knowledge flows remains paramount: not as a goal in itself, but to lay focus on the power-laden negotiations that occur in such circulation and adoption processes.

With regard to world-systems approaches, we are well advised to take seriously the proposition that the enclosure of knowledge via intellectual property rights is indeed a critically important mechanism of appropriating knowledge that becomes especially problematic when Northern companies tap into the knowledge sources elsewhere (e.g. biopiracy). Yet, this must not foreclose the possibility of other, and potentially more promising, ways of linking knowledge and re/production. Visibilizing less exploitative practices as a means to nurture them, the ordinary periphery would also pay attention to forms of knowledge sharing and commoning or the intricate ways in which knowledge commoning relates to complex attributing and licensing practices (Hess and Ostrom 2006). To excavate the power-laden negotiations – rather than only distributional struggles – involved in knowledge and re/productive practices (rather than geographically locating them as value-added) in enterprises and to show the diversity of pathways toward pluriversal projects of surviving well is a more fruitful way to think about the stakes of negotiating extra-local knowledge sources. Such negotiations can be conceived as onto-epistemic, rooted in a diversity of views on survival, sufficiency, and surplus. Table 1 summarizes the commonalities and differences of the three approaches.

Table 1. Commonalities/Differences of the approaches.

	peripheral innovation	world-systems approaches	ordinary periphery
central focus	knowledge creation	value transfer and capture	surviving well together
origins/critique	territorial innovation models	methodological nationalism	capitalocentrism/world and global cities
grounding	critical realism	critical realism	ethico-onto-epistemology
organizational metaphor	network/pipeline/archipelago	chain/network	community/network
firm embedded in	capitalism/place	capitalism	place/territory
relationality	firm-network	core-periphery	web of life
definition periphery	Geographical (predominatly)	functional (capitalocentric)	diversity (non-capitalocentric)
approach toward periphery	lack/asset-based	lack-based	asset-based
why innovation	Competitiveness, employment, repopulation	Upgrading, strategic coupling	Surviving well together, sufficiency
aspiration	universal development	universal development	pluriversal post-development
value category	Exchange/surplus value (implicit)	exchange/surplus value (explicit)	Necessary-sufficiency-surplus/use value/alternative ontologies of value

An ordinary periphery approach in Armenia and Georgia

In the absence of an ordinary periphery literature on enterprises in Armenia and Georgia, I illustrate the key points of the reconstructed knowledge and re/production interface with secondary literature, focusing on marginalized subsistence knowledge and practices in Armenia and Georgia as sources for innovative entrepreneurial projects. This stands in contrast to most economic and innovation studies that posit Armenia and Georgia as lacking in relevant knowledge, skills and capacities, thus in dire need of expert knowledge. From a world-systems perspective, subsistence practices fulfill the condition of peripherality since they imply little integration into global production processes. Despite such assessments, ecologists in the region emphasize how traditional ecological knowledge underpinning subsistence practices – agriculture/horticulture, animal husbandry, forest management and gathering-hunting practices – have achieved remarkable levels of sustainability and community re/production (Andrea et al. 2021; Kikvidze 2020b) but also a sense of identity through, e.g., common foods and festivities.

Here, traditional does not mean static but adapting to changing (political, climatic) circumstances, innovatively evolving over time, including constant negotiations whether and how exogenous knowledge sources shall be adopted (Kikvidze 2020a). Traditional knowledge is currently rather leveraged for household provisioning (food, medicine) than for formal businesses. The concern for subsistence shows the association of this knowledge with use values for reproduction. Ecologists interrogate the marginalization of subsistence knowledge based on its alleged “low agricultural productivity” (UNECE 2023, 2). Instead, they highlight “acceptable productivity without the use of commercial fertilisers or pesticides” (Kikvidze 2020a, 126) coupled with what could be termed “high reproductivity”: practices underpinned by traditional subsistence knowledge foster biodiversity and the reproductive capacity of more-than-human communities. This stands in contrast to the often monocultural landscapes by industrialized agriculture with its (short-term) high productivity and yields – the predominant way of assessing agriculture in both Soviet-style and capitalist enterprises.

Many elements of subsistence knowledge were transformed, even lost, by the imposition of Soviet agricultural knowledge systems. This was due to multiple factors such as forced collectivization; the associated division of labor within large-scale farms leading to professionalization but also disintegration of knowledge; reliance on inputs from other actors within the Soviet planning system such as fertilizers, pesticides and high yielding varieties that were established through special breeding programs. With the Soviet collapse, this complex system was almost entirely dismantled. Land and farms were decollectivized and as a result of land reform in the 1990s, most rural households in Armenia and Georgia engage in small-scale subsistence farming nowadays.

In lieu of the Soviet state, a variety of actors (most notably the successor states, but also development agencies, NGOs, certifying bodies, and enterprises), currently enact their visions of desirable agricultural innovations, broadly centering around modernization and external expert knowledge (Fey 2016): Better technologies, larger farms, commercial pesticide usage, high yields and labor productivity, and appropriate marketing knowledge. More recently, there are some tendencies by NGOs to include agro-biodiversity into the equation. Leaving the mode of appropriation and land ownership (private rather than by the party state) and the new focus on market knowledge and agro-biodiversity aside, these knowledge systems bear strong similarities with Soviet agricultural knowledge production. High yield varieties remain popular but now seeds are imported from outside the post-Soviet space, further challenging genetic diversity and endemic crops (Akhalkatsi, Ekhvaia, and Asanidze 2012) and creating significant dependencies on seed producers. The same could be argued for commercial pesticides that are often thought of as indispensable by farmers themselves (Fey 2016). Thus, we observe how subsistence knowledge becomes sites of power-laden onto-epistemic negotiations around what counts as valuable knowledge for present and future.

Despite these long-standing challenges to sustainable subsistence knowledge, they still persist, with little institutional support: marginalized by ministries and development organizations, mostly ecologists and anthropologists are interested in codifying these usually orally and bodily transmitted knowledge systems. Moreover, they ask whether and how such threatened knowledge assets are translated into sustainable business models benefitting the ordinary periphery (Kikvidze 2020b), thus countering ongoing depopulation, preserving ways of life, communality, and complex ecosystems. Here, the concern is not only about value capture but about the effects of practices underpinned by subsistence knowledge for the “well-being of a socio-ecological system” (Tevzadze and Kikvidze 2016, 259). This literature focuses on sustainable eco-tourism (Tevzadze and Kikvidze 2016) but also cultivation of ancient grapevine cultivars and traditional viticultural practices for a future-oriented wine production (Sargolzaei et al. 2021). Onto-epistemic negotiations remain central: Commodification of subsistence knowledge must negotiate the perhaps conflicting demands of value chain stakeholders: finance, national and international production regulations, certifiers, retailers and clients. An important question is how practices of gifting, sharing, feasting and self-provisioning, tightly connected with subsistence knowledge and practice in Armenia and Georgia, are modified through commodification. With regard to eco-tourism, initial research suggests that a “positive interaction between tourism and local culture provides unique services and contributes to sustainability” (Gugushvili, Salukvadze, and Salukvadze 2019, 25). In export-oriented businesses, the multiplication of stakeholders in the web of life will complicate such assessments. Most crucially, can subsistence knowledge be leveraged without sacrificing balanced extraction of plants and forest products to the altar of potential high market demand; without restricting access to knowledge and planetary commons and to truly benefit local communities rather than a few appropriators of knowledge and labor, especially lead firms in the Global North? These negotiations, and their effects on surviving well together, are arguably as important as the analysis of economistic gains along such networks. Most importantly, rather than looking to the past, this embodied knowledge imagines and enacts pluriversal futures.

Implications for future research and practice

This paper confronts the problems identified by Pugh and Dubois (2021) and offers the ordinary periphery program as one potential solution. Going beyond fuzzy and static notions of peripherality, it starts with a robust, relational and dynamic theorization of peripherality. In Armenia and Georgia, the meaning of peripherality is not static but depending on the relationally defined position in production networks – either disconnected from them or as raw material suppliers. The problem of peripherality not so much the fair share of the value-added pie itself but its socio-ecological and onto-epistemic ramifications.

Future research could delineate how innovative entrepreneurialism contributes to satisfying the quantitative and qualitative survival, sufficiency and surplus needs, wants, and desires of more-than-human communities rather than primarily satisfying market needs. One of the most promising fields that warrants further investigation, is how endogenous knowledge and material assets and the negotiation with extra-local knowledge forms can be transformed into sustainable and ecologically just business transactions. Taking a relational perspective seriously means that survival, sufficiency or surplus needs of enterprises cannot be disentangled anymore from the needs of other relationally connected participants in the web of life: subsistence households, non-human labor, possible suppliers and finance.

Perhaps because developmentalist thinking and practice, such as exemplified by UNECE, has hijacked the innovation discourse in Eurasia (UNECE 2020, 2021, 2023) and beyond, scholars influenced by post-development thinking in post-socialist peripheries have so far shied away from engaging with innovation. Such a mistrust is unfortunate because it inadvertently reinforces innovation as a developmentalist tool, not properly reflecting the manifold voices challenging the meaning (not only technological but also social, frugal and ecological) and reference point (from competition to well-being) of innovation.

Seen in this light, the question finally lurks whether the innovation, entrepreneurialism and post-development literature at large can benefit from studying examples of the East(ern peripheries). Should the project of bringing the East on the map of Anglophone knowledge production, as Müller (2018) proposes, also consist in researching, understanding and valuing innovations in the East in their own right? The ordinary periphery approach is an invitation to insert peripheralized places into the debates around innovation and entrepreneurialism.

Conclusion

The paper reviewed two distinct approaches to analyze enterprise innovation in the periphery. It identifies the ordinary periphery approach as an alternative to capitalocentric peripheral innovation and world-systems approaches. The ordinary periphery questions ideas that assume becoming like the core is a desirable goal, and instead embraces pluriversal pathways to well-being. While it on the one hand embraces the idea of a diverse economy, in which core and peripheral regions are epistemologically equalized as “ordinary”, it nonetheless maintains the ontological differences based on interdependent relations of re/production (“peripherality”).

I thus hope to offer a starting point to explore how peripheralized enterprises can challenge the core without resorting to capitalocentric counterprojects. Rather than offering a fully fledged approach, I presented some elements of an ordinary periphery approach. Regarding knowledge, I argued treating social innovation and frugal innovation debates as not distinct from, but relatable to, enterprise innovation. Regarding re/production, I argued to complicate exchange and surplus value-centered debates. This occurs through embedding enterprises in the web of life, which expresses that their survival, sufficiency and surplus needs are relationally connected to multiple stakeholders (workers, suppliers, finance, clients, but also households and non-human labor).

Centrally, the investigation of the innovation/knowledge interface in the periphery must transcend distribution-centric questions and could benefit from focusing on “onto-epistemic negotiations”. These negotiations attempt to subordinate innovation processes to overarching goals of “surviving well together” in increasingly fragile ecologies. Post-socialist peripheries offer an abundance of examples where communities are severely affected by their (non-)integration into production and infrastructural networks and that can profoundly inform theory-building and imagining pluriversal futures. This paper was concerned to identify the stakes in peripheral innovation research. The ordinary core can learn from a wider engagement with knowledge-re/production interfaces in the ordinary periphery as is the case vice-versa. Still, one should take seriously the differentiated starting points of that engagement.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this paper was accompanied by many people. I especially wish to thank Jan Bartsch, Thilo Lang, Ana Mirtskhulava, and Lena Stephan for comments on earlier drafts as well as the editors, and two reviewers whose recommendations considerably improved the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [SFB 1199, sub-project A02].

Notes

1. Note, however, that Eder includes other words than “peripheral”/”periphery” in his literature overview, including “rural” and “remote” (Eder 2019, 123). Next to geographical considerations, also demographical and functional considerations seem to play a role.

2. Note that also world-systems approaches differentiate peripheries further. Drawing on Jacobs, Taylor identifies “three types of disrupted places (abandoned regions, cleared regions and warped cityless regions), and two types of connected regions (supply regions and transplant regions)” (Taylor 2004, 46).