What can the bamboo industry learn from timber? Resource mobilization across global innovation systems in the construction sector

Abstract

In the scholarly literature on the geography of transitions, the global innovation systems framework has been used to understand how system resources—such as knowledge, legitimacy, markets, and financial investments—are linked across various geographical scales, contributing to the emergence and performance of an innovation system within a distinct technological field. In this paper, we further develop and adapt the conceptualization of global innovation systems to the case in which system resources of a focal innovation system are mobilized from adjacent innovation systems, building on the literature on technology interactions. Empirically, we demonstrate how multi-scalar resource mobilizations between two innovation systems emerge in the case of the evolving spatially sticky innovation system of bamboo building technologies, which draws system resources from the more mature market-anchored innovation system of timber building technologies. We find that the bamboo system mobilizes legitimacy, knowledge, and market resources from the timber system in a commensal relationship, meaning that the bamboo system benefits while the timber system is not affected by the interaction. Given the footloose nature of knowledge resources in the timber system, compared to the system’s spatially sticky valuation-related resources, the former are more easily mobilized across systems than the latter. Moreover, we posit that the distinct spatial anchoring of both systems hinders further cross-system resource mobilization. Our paper contributes to geographical innovation and transition research by providing a conceptual lens for understanding resource mobilization across innovation system boundaries.