IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-13693-3_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Knowledge Flows in Innovation

In: Exploring Expertise

Author

Listed:
  • Wendy Faulkner

Abstract

Early innovation studies1 were concerned, amongst other things, to assess the contribution of different knowledge generating activities — including ‘public science’ — to industrial innovation. Typically these studies sought to identify a single main institutional source of the original idea for the innovation under investigation, and of the major technical inputs to subsequent problem-solving (see Rothwell, 1977 for a review). Despite this rather crude approach, there is remarkable convergence (averaging across industries) in the results of these studies. Around two third of the knowledge used by companies in the course of innovation was found to derive from their own in-house research, design and development (RD&D)2 effort and expertise, the remaining third coming from external sources. The largest single external sources of technical inputs to innovation is usually other companies (users, suppliers and competitors); the contribution of public sector research (academic and government laboratories) varies across sectors, from 5 to 20 per cent (Rothwell, 1977). In short, innovation demands knowledge from a range of internal and external sources.

Suggested Citation

  • Wendy Faulkner, 1998. "Knowledge Flows in Innovation," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Robin Williams & Wendy Faulkner & James Fleck (ed.), Exploring Expertise, chapter 8, pages 173-195, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-13693-3_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-13693-3_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-13693-3_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.