Introduction

Summary

Innovation and technological change are highly affected by the sector in which they take place. The agents, the relationships among actors and the institutions of a sector all exert a major and profound influence on the differences in innovation across sectors. How to consider these effects on innovation? And how to take into account differences across sectors?

This book examines innovation in six major sectors in Europe and in other advanced countries: pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, telecommunications equipment and services, chemicals, software, machine tools and services (airports, medical and retailing). These sectors have been chosen because, in them, technological change is quite rapid, and innovation plays a major role in fostering growth and in affecting the competitiveness of firms and countries.

This volume proposes a novel approach to looking at innovation in sectors. It provides a sectoral systems of innovation framework, which uses a multidimensional, integrated and dynamic view of sectors in order to analyze innovation. Although this book focuses on innovation, the concept of sectoral systems can also be applied to production. The notion of SSIs departs from the traditional concept of sector used in industrial economics because it examines other agents in addition to firms, places great emphasis on knowledge, learning and sectoral boundaries, focuses on non-market as well as on market interactions, and pays much attention to institutions. In an SSI perspective, firms are active actors that shape their technological and market environments.