The emergence of an industrial infrastructure for technological innovation

This paper proposes a social system framework to examine how an industrial infrastructure emerges to facilitate and inhibit technological innovation. This infrastructure includes institutional arrangements, resource endowments, and proprietary activities that are necessary to develop and commercialize an innovation. This industrial infrastructure emerges through the accretion of numerous events involving many public and private sector actors over an extended period of time. The practical implication of this perspective is that policies directed at technological innovation to achieve economic reform must not only be concerned with the micro organization and activities of the firm, but also with the creation of a macro industrial infrastructure that any technological community needs to sustain its members.