Abstract:

Building innovation systems that integrate the sectors of science, education and business and create knowledge, which is technologically, economically and socially useful, is a common policy task for all the European countries. Innovative development is a key factor for European knowledge-based economy to be competitive in the global world. This task involves creating spaces of inter-organizational interaction (both physical and virtual) across the sectors and regions to encourage knowledge creation as well as to provide conditions for its evolution into innovations. We name these spaces innovation landscapes.

Innovation landscape is a large complex self-organizing network structure, consisting of scientific, education and business organizations, which share knowledge, expertise and resources. It crosses regional and national borders providing trans-regional and trans-national integration. Innovation alliances are managed non-linearly and are not coordinated from any single centre. Innovations emerge as a result of collision of different cultures, relations, semantic structures, ideas, skills and resources.

Developing innovation landscapes in Europe involves building effective interpersonal networks of intellectual communication to connect members of research, academic and business organizations. Previous research on social networks (M. Granovetter, R. Burt, B. Latour, H. White, to name a few) and on the mechanisms of knowledge creation in the networks of intellectual communication (R. Collins, K. Carley, K. Hakkarainen et. al, P. Monge, N. Contractor, and others) has yielded theoretical and empirical results giving the understanding of how knowledge creation and innovative processes in intellectual communication networks run. Systems of integration between science, education and business have also been widely researched in literature on networks and clusters. In our previous research we also investigated integration processes between science, education, and business; innovation processes; and networks of intellectual communication.

However, interrelations between interpersonal intellectual networks and the processes of inter-organizational integration between science, education, and business in the innovation landscapes have almost never been analyzed in details. The mechanisms of emergence of innovation landscapes on the basis of intellectual networks have also been insufficiently analyzed.

The project we intend to present is entitled Intellectual Networks Creating Innovation Landscapes for European Knowledge-Based Economy. It involves organizations from all across Europe to combine existing theoretical studies and develop them into an empirical comparison of the cases of different European countries. It will allow answering two main research questions:
(1) What are the factors driving the emergence of innovation landscapes on the basis of intellectual networks in different European contexts?
(2) How can government stimulate emergence of effective intellectual communication networks to develop innovation landscapes in Europe?

The paper will cover general theoretical framework and research methodology of the project.

Keywords:

Intellectual network, innovation landscape, Europe, knowledge-based economy, science, education, business.