Challenges of knowledge combination in strategic regional innovation processes - the Creative Science Park in Aveiro

This paper considers how heterogeneous groups of regional stakeholders design and implement strategic activities that contribute to their region’s innovation capacity. We aim to understand how these stakeholder groups attempt to create new regional development pathways, and explore why otherwise enthusiastic and willing partnerships might fail to progress. We conceptualize this in terms of partners seeking to develop a shared actionable knowledge set as the basis for future development, and contend that one explanation for these failures might be a failure of the ways that partners combine their knowledge. We conceptualize strategic processes in terms of a series of distinct phases, and identify how problems in knowledge combination processes might manifest themselves in preventing the creation of valuable knowledge for subsequent action. Drawing on a detailed empirical case study of the Creative Science Park in Aveiro (Portugal), we argue that a better understanding of inter-stakeholder knowledge combination processes is necessary for creating and implementing better strategic transformational development processes for regions.