Interactive learning and non-globalisation: knowledge creation by Norwegian software firms

This paper analyses the tendency of firms to concentrate their innovative activities in their home country. We take an innovation systems approach, arguing that knowledge creation is a complex and systemic phenomenon not easily duplicated elsewhere. Interactive learning is a composite concept, describing several interrelated learning processes at work on every level of the economy. We analyse the concept of interactive learning relative to potentially important knowledge contributors, identified on the basis of stylised facts about software industrial dynamics. We demonstrate that, despite numerous factors and conditions that should, ceteris paribus, encourage Norwegian software firms to globalise their innovative activities, they remain largely non-globalised and that this is due, in part, to the complexities of interactive learning in an innovation system.