Economic Crisis, Turbulence and the Resilience of Innovation: Insights from the Atlantic Maritime Cluster

Abstract

Innovation is related to economic cycles. Often seen as a procyclical phenomenon, many innovation actors try and succeed in maintaining (and even increasing) their innovation efforts to gain competitive advantage during the crises. In this chapter, departing from the recent developments in regional studies, which understand resilience as an evolutionary capacity of socio-economic systems, we suggest the notion of ‘resilience of innovation’ as the capacity of an innovation process to maintain its function at different levels of operation. Drawing upon the results from a survey on knowledge provision and needs of maritime cluster innovative actors in the European Atlantic Area, our analysis focuses on the evolution of innovation and knowledge services. We provide parametric and non-parametric evidence of the differences in the provision and utilisation of these services and provide econometric evidence of the main factors that influence the resilience of innovation at the organizational level.