White Spaces Innovation in Sweden - Innovation policy for ... - Vinnova

WHITE SPACES INNOVATION IN SWEDENcause distance out from the present human capability decays dramatically, such novelmoves are generally fairly short-range but adjacent. Adjacency means „close at hand‟but it implies no particular directionality. Thus it can be straightforward, or an angleforwards, sideways or, interestingly, backwards. This captures the Schumpeterian notionof innovation being intimately bound up with new combinations of knowledge,including re-combinations of old knowledge as well as of combinations of new and oldand even, conceivably, new and new knowledge. Consider Fig. 4.2 which is a beforeand after depiction of book production following the radical Gutenberg book printingsystem paradigm shift. First, consider what is „old‟ knowledge represented in the shiftfrom illuminated copying typical of the book market before (e.g. as in Bologna circa1450) to the Gutenberg process by circa 1500. This is especially interesting becauseonly the „client‟ is common to both Lane‟s (2009) representations of the rise in complexityfrom the one to the other. In the lower diagram, while elements of fixed capitalsuch as the press and dies appear to be new, one (the press) was a preadaptation of thewine press, still a relatively recent introduction to the Mainz region with its rapidlygrowing wine industry, while the other (dies and characters) were invented earlier inChina. Where can new and old knowledge be seen combining? The institutions of thebookseller and book fair were innovations new to the book trade but not to economies ingeneral. Perhaps the newest productive elements were those associated with the author,editor and printer and, associated with them new mediators such as agents, copyrightersand lawyers. The new, new knowledges were a mixture of those just discussed but muchmore, the increasingly complex publishing system as a whole. This included the newskills associated with printing, the new ways ink was applied to paper, the interactionsbetween various new actors and the institutional innovations associated with these suchas serial rather than one-off production of editions, their marketing, mediating and competitivepublishing.81