Beyond spillovers: interrogating innovation and creativity in the peripheries: Andrey N. Petrov
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction In the last few decades the idea of innovation as a regional, geographically specific phenomenon inspired the interest of scholars all across economic geography and regional science. Placelessness of knowledge production has since been boldly rejected and replaced by the notions of embeddedness (Grabher 1993), regionality (Lundvall 1992), institutional ‘fertility’ (Amin 1999), regional ‘learning’ (Morgan 1997), knowledge ‘spillovers,’ personal and regional interconnectedness (Gertler 1995; Bathelt and Boggs 2005), innovator’s agency (Feldman 2000; Florida 2002; Schienstock 2007), local synergies and innovative milieus (Gradus and Lithwick 1996), and other spatial (meta)theories of knowledge economy (Tremblay 2005; see also chapters in this book). It has certainly become conventional to cite innovation and innovativeness among major drivers of regional development and key elements of regional competitiveness. Theability of place to induce and/or ad(a)opt innovations is widely perceived as a condition, determining success in knowledge-driven economic growth (for example, Feldman 2000; Florida 2002; Cooke and Leydesdorff 2006). However, the knowledge economy research has had an apparent geographical bias, heavily focusing on core areas, especially urban metropolises. Although the preoccupation with large urban regions reflects the objective concentration of innovation (Florida 2005; Polese and Tremblay 2005), this tradition unjustly marginalizes peripheries, and especially remote areas as study sites. Meanwhile, as argued below (pp. 00-00), the importance of innovation in economic development is not an exclusive prerogative of large conurbations, but is the property of all regions, including the deepest peripheries. Moreover, there is growing evidence that local innovation and creativity (both broadly defined) can be even more critical for reviving economies in middle-sized and small towns, as well as rural and remote areas (Polese et al. 2002; Aarsaether 2004; Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007; McGranahan and Wojan 2007; O’Hagan and Cecil 2007; Petrov 2007; Virkkala 2007; Hall and Donald 2009). Whereas ‘less favored’ areas received considerable attention in the European context (Gradus and Lithwick 1996; Morgan 1997; Leimgruber 2004; Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007), the scope of general inquiry into innovative capacities and creative capital is usually confined by the limits of innovation spillovers incoming from an urban ‘core.’ Even though those, mostly European, peripheries have been involved or even have become prominent building blocks of the regional innovation systems theory, they had been rarely marginalized enough (either geographically or otherwise) to remain ‘beyond spillovers.’ To the contrary, knowledge creation in extremely remote areas, such as Canada’s northern frontier, appears to lie outside the major theoretical debates and empirical generalizations. This chapter interrogates conceptual foundations and emerging empirical evidence pertaining to creative capacities and regional varieties of innovation systems in the deep peripheries, and specifically in the Canadian North. I contemplate three arguments. First, creativity and innovation (both broadly defined) in remote areas are vital for economic viability no less than in industrial-innovative cores and that the role of individual innovators is no less profound. Second, some Canadian peripheral regions have accumulated creative capacities to become innovative hotspots and, thus, engines of regional innovation. Third, emerging innovation systems in the periphery rely on social capital and community efforts as much as on other (traditional) factors of successful innovation. Finally, I suggest that peripheral areas have a degree of innovation autonomy, particularly in respect to entrepreneurial, public and civic innovations, when the transformative events for regional ‘reinvention’ can come from within the remote region itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".