August 6, 2007
Knowledge Collaboration and Proximity
Hello fellow ARConauts. I hope Summer finds you pleasently dispersed.
Since I’m under the assumption that not everybody is a regular reader of European Urban and Regional Studies, I thought I’d bring the following article to your attention:
Moodysson, Jerker, and Ola Jonsson. 2007. ”Knowledge Collaboration and Proximity: The Spatial Organization of Biotech Innovation Projects.” European Urban and Regional Studies 14(2):115-131.
http://eur.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/2/115?etoc
I mostly thought the article would be interesting to some of you because, although they do so in a significantly different language, the authors seem to be asking a question similar to our own, namely: which factors are important for successful intellectual/conceptual collaboration?
Their starting point is the seeming paradox that while most of the literature on biotech & other intellectual collaborations seems to show the importance of physical proximity (for example in “science parks”) larger-scale (read: international) connections are also paramount.
Their answer: we need to be more specific about what we mean by “proximity” (they identify two varieties–one of them being “physical” and the other “relationa;”) and we need to be more specific about what we mean by knowledge (of which they identify 4 ideal types). The rest of the article is an emperical study of the relative importance of the various forms of “proximity” for collaborations based on the exchange of each of the four types of knowledge they identify.
What I find useful
Although we, as ethnographers, should probably be less than satisfied with their rather broad ideal types (adjectives that other researchers have used to think about proximity, such as “institutional”, “cognitive”, “cultural” seem to them overly fuzzy and “inoperable” in an empirical sense… so they lump them all together under the aegis of “relational proximity”!), I did find their attempt to develop a vocabulary/ideal type set of collaborations quite provocative.
Plus, I think that their basic conclusion–that certain types of collaborations are better suited to certain types of proximities–might be helpful to us as a continuing collaboratory. For example, what kinds of things are best accomplished through face-to-face contact (ie, our “lab meetings”) and what kinds of things are better handled over the internet and/or across institutional barriers? To take just one example, their research would suggest that our attempts at “concept work” (what they would call “embrained knowledge”–a term we probably should not be comfortable with) would not be the best use of our physical proximity (for those of us in Berkeley).
In the very least, the article made me aware of a whole literature on this stuff. Who knew there is something called the French School of Proximity Dynamics?
hey kevin,
cheers for the post, i don’t have access to journals from my house, if you had the pdf on file could you send it / post it?
I don’t know if I *can* post it, due to copyright, etc…
nice to see that our work finds its way also outside the economic geography community. if you’re interested in this article, please send me an email (jerker dot moodysson at keg dot lu dot se). we also have a paper on a similar topic entitled “explaining spatial patterns of innovation: analytical and synthetic modes of knowledge creation in the medicon valley life science cluster” forthcoming in environment and planning a later this year. best wishes, jerker.