Strengthening advanced manufacturing innovation ecosystems: The case of Massachusetts

By E. Reynolds, Y. Uygun. Technological forecasting & social change, 2017

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Recent years have brought a renewed focus on the importance of manufacturing to the health and future growth of nations and regions. Several studies have highlighted the need to maintain and build manufacturing capabilities to support economic growth and have linked a nation's as well as region's strength in manufacturing to its ability to innovate. In the U.S., where a manufacturing strategy has largely been absent for the past 25 years, advanced manufacturing capabilities are now seen as essential to the development of new products and processes across a range of industries. Against this backdrop, Massachusetts presents an interesting case since manufacturing in this U.S. state is integral to several of its most important industry clusters, yet it is a high wage, high costs state that must compete globally. This research examines the pathways and opportunities for building and fostering innovation capacity among Massachusetts manufacturers, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We employ a systems approach to conduct analytic and empirical analyses that consider how knowledge and sources of innovation flow between key participants within the manufacturing innovation ecosystem. We find that the Massachusetts manufacturing innovation ecosystem is rich in terms of assets but relatively poor in terms of interconnectedness between those assets. In addition, rather than being focused on demand-driven innovation and technological upgrading for SMEs, non-market state-supported manufacturing intermediaries are primarily focused on supply-side, point solutions that work with individual firms rather than at a systems level.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fae2065cdf60135b7c5c9d071b65f02c23658274

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Universities and open innovation: the determinants of network centrality (2019, background): “The discourse on the role of universities as knowledge transfer institutions and key nodes in innovation systems is largely reliant on empirical work from exemplar regions; that is, those regions which are among the most innovative in the world (Saxenian 1994; Lawton Smith 2003; Gertler and Wolfe 20”
Industry 4.0: A Bibliometric Review of Its Managerial Intellectual Structure and Potential Evolution in the Service Industries (2019, background): “0 in own study, through the use of the term “advanced manufacturing” (Reynolds and Uygun, 2018) introduced by the US government to illustrate and describe the same principles as those pertaining to industry 4.”
Open Innovation 4.0 as an Enhancer of Sustainable Innovation Ecosystems (2020, background): “The consistent emergence of innovations requires a dynamic and sustainable ecosystem encompassing universities and research agencies, financial endowments, sufficient demand, human capital, specialized knowledge, and willingness to collaborate in a global perspective [4,16].”
Influences of the Industry 4.0 Revolution on the Human Capital Development and Consumer Behavior: A Systematic Review (2020, background): “This can be achieved by introducing strategic planning at the level of SMEs, in conjunction with a national strategic plan [103].”