Understanding the mechanisms for successful collaborative innovation projects in clusters: the role of architectural knowledge

Innovation is increasingly viewed as a collective action, which involves heterogeneous actors that exchange and combine their knowledge. In this view, many studies focus on how clusters contexts facilitate the exchange of knowledge but we still know relatively little about how clusters facilitate the combination of knowledge among heterogeneous actors. The Combination process appears to be a critical point to foster successful knowledge integration that would conduct to innovation collaborations. This is the aim of this paper: explore the micro-mechanisms that explain how a cluster' structure can favours knowledge integration, with a specific focus on the combination process, and why these micro-mechanisms are critical for collaborative innovation projects to arise locally. Following a qualitative methodology (grounded theory) based on a case study research design we conducted a comparative study of two high-tech clusters in France: one in the microelectronics sector and one in the information and communication technology sector. An emergent-grounded model conceptualises the results, describing and explaining the mechanisms enhancing successful participation of clusters' members into collaborative innovation projects. The overarching result of our study is the discovery of architectural knowledge at the cluster level as an important underlying mechanism affecting the dynamics of knowledge integration in a cluster and enhancing its members' capacity to generate innovation projects. This study has implications on how scholars conceptualize territorial innovation by (1) enriching the concept of cluster-level architectural knowledge and (2) improving the understanding of the role of spatial proximity on collaborative innovation processes.