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198 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

intermediaries (e.g. consultants, or professional and trade associations) also play
a crucial role in driving innovations in service delivery. This means managing
knowledge flows, not simply from suppliers to users, but through the interacting
networks of suppliers, users and intermediary groups. This view that the locus
of innovation has fundamentally shifted underpins the growth of new, and more
interactive, or networked, models of innovation, discussed next.

>> NETWORKED INNOVATION

Process views emphasize that innovation is fundamentally influenced by networks
and social interactions including, for example, intra- and inter-firm networks,
professional and occupational networks, educational networks, regional networks
and so on. Networks of various kinds have been found to play an important role in
communicating knowledge, as seen in Chapter 8, and also as trendsetters – legit-
imizing some new approaches over others (Pittaway et al., 2004). For example,
the design and diffusion of advanced manufacturing technologies in the 1980s
was heavily influenced by networks of professions (such as the American Pro-
duction and Inventory Control Association) and consultants (such as IBM and
the Oliver Wight consultancy in the USA). Through these networks knowledge
about a particular technology (Manufacturing Resources Planning, or ‘MRP2’)
was promoted as the new best practice despite the fact that other, arguably more
efficient, technologies were available at the time (Swan and Newell, 1995). Simi-
larly, networks of multiple users of mainframe computers, largely based in univer-
sities, were critical in the development of e-mail in the mid-1960s.
The nature of network interactions and their influence on innovation processes
also depends quite crucially on the local organizational and institutional context in
which they occur (Clark, 2000; Swan et al., 2007a). For example, in the biotech-
nology sector, networks connecting up-stream (e.g. academic research) and down-
stream (e.g. commercial firms and hospitals) producers of life science knowledge are
generally denser in certain parts of the United States than those observed in Europe
(Owen-Smith et al., 2002), making it easier for knowledge to flow across these
domains. To some extent this gives the United States a natural head start in terms
of being able to develop innovations that need knowledge to be combined across
these different groups (Swan et al., 2007a). It also means that attempts to manage
knowledge that involves bridging academic, clinical and commercial practice (e.g.
knowledge-transfer networks) are likely to be more challenging in the United King-
dom than in some parts of the United States (e.g. Massachusetts or California).
These characteristics of networks, and national differences, are rarely taken
sufficient account of by policy-makers when they set up network initiatives
for innovation. One such initiative in the United Kingdom was the Genetics
Knowledge Parks (GKPs), launched by the UK Department of Health and
the Department of Trade and Industry to bring together academic genetics
scientists, hospital clinicians, commercial forms, and legal and social scientists
on a regional basis in order to better exploit genetics knowledge for improv-
ing medical practice (Robertson, 2007). This initiative was loosely modeled

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