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This introductory chapter offers a general definition of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs), lays out the motivation for why they matter to businesses, and presents the organization of the book. It also tells the story of how the World Wide Web evolved from the original visionary idea in the 1940s of linking information together electronically. This story introduces the concepts of swarm creativity, innovation, collaboration, and communication.

Innovation systems cannot be conceptualized without understanding the interactions between different actors in the system. These interactions take many different forms. The scholarly literature has studied them with broad or narrow notions. This chapter aims at providing an encompassing view of these different phenomena, putting them directly into the theoretical context of the innovation systems approach. This is done not only for the sake of conceptual clarification, but above all for identifying the concrete obstacles and deficiencies associated with these interactions that might plague the innovation system. This serves as the basis for distinguishing and classifying the wide diversity of network-oriented innovation policy instruments that governments have deployed through time. Just as in other chapters of this book, the unintended negative consequences created by the application of these instruments are also examined. Finally, the chapter puts forward a set of criteria for the design and redesign of these instruments.

In Chapter 13, Demarest and collaborators present evidence from the southwestern frontier Classic Maya port city of Cancuen that can help explain the nature of the southern lowlands’ economic decline by contrasting it with Cancuen’s late eighth century economic transformations and meteoric florescence; while other western Petén dynasties disintegrated, Cancuen flourished. One element of this apogee was the creation of new forms of monumental and ritual settings to recruit and maintain non-Maya economic exchange partners. This “innovation network” came to control critical routes and resources leading to changes in management, production, and economic power. However, as with many high-risk “innovation partnership networks,” success was truncated by abrupt network failure. Evaluation of this phenomenon by economists provides insights into ancient Maya economy and the role of monumentality in both its legitimation and transformation.

The world’s premier metropolitan areas (‘global cities’) are key nodes in international business networks and function as important international innovation hubs. They are prominent spaces for knowledge exchange and collaboration on innovation yet their specific and changing role in global innovation networks has not received due attention. This chapter contributes an analysis of the changing role of global cities in global collaborative innovation networks, 2000–2014, by examining co-invention linkages across 125 global cities in forty-six countries. The international linkages of global cities have increased substantially over the period. Growth has been most pronounced in a number of Asian cities that rank among the top cities in the world in the most recent period. The patterns attest to the growing importance of international collaboration for innovation and the premier position of global cities as spaces facilitating such collaboration.

Non-local linkages are considered to be crucial for innovation in regions because they provide access to new knowledge and ideas. This helps places to avoid or overcome lock-in situations. The cluster literature has focused on gatekeepers that may diffuse non-local knowledge to cluster firms. In the global city literature, this gatekeeping role is taken up by multinational enterprises and knowledge-intensive business services. However, little attention has yet been focused on the nature of these non-local linkages. Not all non-linkages matter for the capacity of a region to innovate. What matters in particular is the extent to which types of knowledge that flow through non-local linkages are complementary to the local knowledge base. What matters is not being connected to other regions per se, but being linked to regions that give access to complementary capabilities. Also, inflows of external agents are crucial for regional innovation, especially for more radical innovations.