The Triple Helix, the Complexity of Technological Innovations, and the Decomposition of National Innovation Systems: An
Loet Leydesdorff suggests a view on technological innovations as a complex process in which he disaggregates national innovation systems. The theoretical model of the “Triple Helix” puts emphasis on transnational and potentially uncoupled dimensions of in
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Loet Leydesdorff suggests a view on technological innovations as a complex process in which he disaggregates national innovation systems. The theoretical model of the “Triple Helix” puts emphasis on transnational and potentially uncoupled dimensions of innovation dynamics. Leydesdorff shows the limits of governmental policies and proposes communication processes as a crucial lens to explore global, national, and regional levels of the knowledge economy.1
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An extended and modified version of this interview, including additional references, can be found on http://www.theory-talks.org/ R. Knoblich (*) IEE/Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany IPWS/Bonn University, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Mayer et al. (eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology - Vol. 1, Global Power Shift, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-55007-2_13, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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How Are States and Technological Innovations Connected? If we take a long-term perspective, then one can say that the nation state—the national or political economies in Europe—were shaped in the nineteenth century, somewhat later for Germany (after 1871), but for most countries it has been the first half of the nineteenth century. This was after the French Revolution and in relation to industrialization. These countries were able to develop an institutional framework for organizing the market as the wealth-generating mechanism. The institutional framework permits to retain wealth, to regulate market forces, and also to steer them to a certain extent. However, the market is not only a local dynamics; it is also a global phenomenon. Nowadays, another global dynamics is involved: science and technology add a different dynamics than the market. The market is an equilibrium-seeking dynamics at each moment of time. According to traditional perspectives on economy, markets are inherently equilibrium-seeking. The evolutionary dynamics of science and technology now add a non-equilibrium-seeking dynamics on top of that, and this puts the nation state in a very different position. Thus, one obtains a complex adaptive dynamics, or an eco-dynamics or however you want to call it—these are different words for approximately the same thing. For the nation state, the question arises how it relates to the market dynamics on the one side, and to the knowledge dynamics on the other. Thus, the nation state has to combine two tasks. Let me illustrate this model of three subdynamics with a figure from my The KnowledgeBased Economy (2006: 24) (Fig. 1). The figure shows that first-order interactions generate a knowledge-based economy as a next-order or global regime on top of the localized trajectories of nation states and innovative firms. These complex dynamics have to be specified and then to be analyzed empirically. For example, knowledge dynamics change the relation between government and economy; they also change the position of the state in relation to the wealth-retaining mechanisms. How can the nation state be organized in such a
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