Place and community responses to opportunity: a example from nanoscience innovation

ABSTRACT

Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada community acting as both a sounding board and also as a collective think tank that mediates across networks in a city-region where strong local elites that draw on mechanical solidarity. This demonstrates the collective learning potential of social networks to be effective mediators in the process of recognizing opportunities. Our participatory research did not pose a regulatory or ethical question for public deliberation. Instead, the public exchanges emerged as diagnostic fora where deliberation lead to a collective evaluation of a proposed nanotechnology cluster. Confronted with an unprecedented area, we trace the attempt of this polity to adapt to the demands of innovation and a knowledge-intensive sector. We found a place-based re-articulation of mechanical and organic forms of solidarity characterized by interdependent specialized sectors across difference. Place plays an important mediating role as a commons.

Keywords:

• Nanotechnology
• community
• mechanical solidarity
• innovation
• place identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The actuality and usefulness of industrial or economic ‘clusters’ (Porter 2000) has been widely debated. The usefulness of this term as a virtual, theory object has been to bring the collective and interactional quality of what usually set firms onto the 'stage' of economic theory and planning. Epistemologically, clusters are not objects but sets (Shields 2006), on the one hand, and outcomes of local routines of social interaction between firms, on the other. The term has been taken up both by local boosters and mobilized reflexively as a framework for gaining state sponsorship of policy-relevant research (see Wolfe 2008; Wolfe and Gertler 2004; Benneworth and Henry 2004).

2 Each interaction is between two units which have a pre-ordained, structural relationship as adjacent steps or links in the teleological process. This reduces the complexity of interaction such that the model fails to capture the reality of multiple feedback loops and relationships that may be formal and informal. In actuality, to participate effectively, each unit requires many more competencies than just those needed to relate to the adjacent two units in the linear model. The linear model has been widely critiqued because actual institutions play multiple roles and specific temporal stages in the linear model may be external or shared, after which the process returns within an institution in various feedback loops. Interlinkages with other processes and exchanges may change the direction or rearrange the participants and locations of innovation.

3 The idea of ‘distributed innovation’ was originally inspired by Collier and Lakoff’s (2008) work on 'distributed preparedness' within US domestic security.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Killam Trusts: [Grant Number Cornerstone Grant]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number Partnership Development Grant].