Resilience and Innovation: A Conceptual Approach

This chapter examines the relationship between resilience and innovation. In the current period of economic uncertainty, resilience is an emerging concept that has been employed by both researchers and policymakers to explore systems’ responsiveness to exogenous shocks. Drawing on the evolutionary economic literature, we argue that resilience is more than a process of return to a pre-crisis equilibrium. It involves, instead, mechanisms of transformations, and therefore, we argue that innovation is among its key determinants. This idea has important antecedents, Schumpeter already claimed that innovation drives economic recovery following phases of recession. However, literature grounded in this topic does not provide a single definition of the term innovation. Some scholars focus on the organizations’ ability to break away from their routines built over time. Others instead, place the entrepreneur at the heart of his theory of innovation. Therefore, to fully comprehend the complex relationship between the different conceptualizations of resilience and innovation, we develop a conceptual framework. To better interpret the insights offered by this conceptual approach, we then analyze the anecdotal evidence of the Cambridge high-tech cluster and Sassuolo tile district resilient local systems