CULTURAL PROXIMITY & KNOWLEDGE GATEKEEPERS

Cultural Proximity and Knowledge Gatekeepers

Cultural Proximity and Knowledge Gatekeepers

INTRODUCTION

Innovativeness has been long identified as fundamental for regions and firm's growth and development. Moreover, there is strong consensus that the capability to develop innovations is strongly related to the capability to collect and manage pieces of knowledge. In fact, scholars have recognized that the technological knowledge embedded into innovations can be considered as a collective good made up of complementary inputs and which production process is shaped by radical indivisibility.

The notion of knowledge gatekeeper derives from the concept of technological gatekeepers, first introduced by Allen (2007), whose function is to link their organizations to the technological world at large, particularly in relation to the problem of communication in technology in a context of R&D organizations. According to a more specific meaning, this concept of technological or knowledge gatekeeper concerns the role of a small number of actors having the capability to collect, combine, and diffuse knowledge, thus bringing it from where it is known to where it is not.

In so doing, knowledge gatekeepers contribute to the interconnection of internal and external resources, allowing local players to benefit from their own external relations, but also giving external players access to local resources. Secondly, they play a corollary role in terms of internal coordination, animating the local networks of firms through the mobilization and activation of local skills and complementarities, thus enabling benefits to be derived from geographical proximity effects, while improving access to locally lacking resources or to external markets.

Drawing on the case of Italian industrial districts, Morrison (2004) and Malipiero et al. (2005) stressed that technological gatekeepers play a significant role in coordinating and stimulating innovation by capturing external relevant knowledge and diffusing it within the cluster. Maintaining the focus on the knowledge dynamics generated within industrial districts, Boschma and ter Wal (2007) recognize knowledge gatekeepers as actors characterd by high values of absorptive capacity, social capital, and strongly connected with external knowledge sources.

Finally, Dangelico et al. (2008) employs a system dynamic analysis to investigate how knowledge gatekeepers improve technology districts' innovative capability, focusing on the role played by organizational and technological proximity. Nevertheless, despite of the growing number of studies dealing with the topic of knowledge gatekeeper, it has been paid very few attention to identify which factors may support such a role, improving gatekeepers' performance (i.e. knowledge mobility), in terms of actors capability to collect and diffuse knowledge.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The systems of innovation approach is an economic theory of the role of learning, where the generation and utilization of knowledge gatekeepers are seen as core economic processes and where utilization of knowledge can be understood as "translation of knowledge elements into new products and processes" (Edquist 2007, p. 2). The systems of innovation approaches emphasize a number of complementary knowledge generating or learning processes. Edquist & Rees (2001) describes learning as the process of disseminating existing knowledge and/or production of new knowledge or new combinations of existing knowledge ...