The concept of core competence
In organisation and management studies, the concept of core competence has become one of the key concepts in the efforts to understand why some firms succeed while others do not, and, as it is believed in this paper, it has a potential to add analytical leverage also in studies focusing on Triple Helix constellations. The key rationale in bringing these fairly disconnected bodies of literature together is that there is much to be learnt across these broad fields of knowledge. In competence thinking, the basic idea is that an organisation should comprehend its own core competences and capabilities in order to utilise the resources available (Pralahad and Hamel
1990). It is also assumed that competences change more slowly than products and markets, and hence, the identity of an organisation should not depend on products and markets but on something more lasting, something that lies at the very core of the organisation’s activities and success (Tuomi
1999, 82–83). Durand (
1998, 306) connects competences directly to an organisation’s resources and property and to individual and organisational capabilities, knowledge, processes, routines and culture. Javidan (
1998, 62) uses the concept of competence to refer to the combining and coordinating of capabilities cutting across functions. Core competence, drawing upon the theory of Pralahad and Hamel (
1990), may be defined predominantly as a collective learning process across the innovation system. For its part, generic competence is taken here to be specifically capability and expertise that is potentially common to several organisations in a Triple Helix constellation but may also be embedded in a single organisation that has a central position in a system. Generic competences are thus distributed over many operations either within an organisation or across them, and therefore, from the Triple Helix point of view, it is essential to approach them from systemic instead of organisational perspectives. For that purpose, a conceptual link between competence thinking and Triple Helix is constructed by a competence set model.
From competence bloc theory to competence set model
The competence set model is inspired by the competence bloc theory (Eliasson
2000), but as the competence bloc theory was mainly constructed to better understand and explain business growth in biotechnology, it needs to be extended with additional competences to provide an analytical tool for broader scrutiny of Triple Helix constellations. The competence of actors and their interaction determines the quality of a competence set and, as assumed here, also interaction in the context of a Triple Helix. Additionally, a set of competences attracts competent investors who contribute positively to the attractiveness of a Triple Helix constellation (Eliasson
2000). A minimum critical competence mass and variety are needed before a Triple Helix becomes truly functional, and, according to Eliasson and Eliasson (
1996), the following actors usually play central roles (modified slightly): (a) competent and active customers and users, (b) innovators who combine new knowledge and technologies in novel ways, (c) entrepreneurs who identify profitable innovations and prepare them for initiation in the market, (d) competent venture financiers who recognise and finance the entrepreneurs, (e) exit markets that facilitate ownership change and (f) industrialists and other established actors who take successful innovations to industrial-scale production. (Eliasson and Eliasson
1996).
Eliasson (
2000) strongly associates competences with the selection of winning technologies and corporate winners, and conversely losing technologies and corporations, and thus, it adds analytical leverage to the Triple Helix relationships that are, according to Cai (
2014), ‘about competition and cooperation for resources, redistribution of power, and network building’. However, importantly, the Triple Helix model reminds that the question is not only about selection of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, or individual companies or narrow industrial sectors, but also more profoundly and broadly about extensive collaboration across institutional spheres for economic growth and renewal. Thus, the question is about how new knowledge emerges, how it generates variation and how selection is made, and thus, moving beyond the narrow organisational and sector-based approaches is fundamental to better support construction of knowledge, consensus and innovation spaces that play a central role in Triple Helix constellations (Ranga and Etzkowitz
2013).
As Ranga and Etzkowitz (
2013) maintain, the main ingredient in a knowledge-based economic development is the creation of a knowledge space that, according to them, ‘encompasses the competences of knowledge generation, diffusion and use of the Triple Helix components’. They define consensus space to refer to a venue that brings together actors from different organisational backgrounds and perspectives for generating new strategies and ideas, the ultimate goal being novel discoveries and related innovations. For its part, innovation space refers to new organisational mechanisms that are geared towards ‘the development of local innovative firms, in parallel with the attraction of talent and innovative firms from elsewhere, the creation and development of intellectual and entrepreneurial potential, and competitive advantage for the region and the country’ (Ranga and Etzkowitz
2013, 247).
Applying Eliasson’s (
2000) conceptualisation, the competence set is defined as a configuration of generic competences that in direct and indirect interaction generates new knowledge as well as its diffusion and valorisation. In other words, competence set is a group of competences, which belong together or are usually found together. Basically, the competence set refers to the ability to achieve new forms of competitive advantage by highlighting the need to continuously renew competences so as to achieve congruence with the changing environment. Moreover, the competence set model may prove useful in the many efforts to boost innovation spaces, i.e. finding new ways to combine capital, technology knowledge and business expertise. It therefore follows that a competence set is a collection of generic competences widely distributed across the three institutional spheres and hence highlights that competences can be consciously reconfigured, redirected, transformed and appropriately shaped, and integrated into existing competences as well as external resources (cf. Teece et al.
1997). Conversely, missing and/or poor competences may freeze interactive innovation processes and lock them in the past.
A sole focus on actors and the relationships between them, typical of innovation system studies, may even blur the view on how systems actually function and what drives them; hence, it is important to make a distinction between organisations and competences. By approaching actors indirectly through competences, it might be possible to clarify and specify the roles that they play in translating new knowledge into viable products and services. For these reasons, the main rationale in constructing a competence set model is (a) to specify what kind of competences are called for in a Triple Helix constellation and (b) to identify the competences that keep a Triple Helix constellation continuously adapting to changing economic landscapes. The competence set may thus also be used (c) to serve as a tool in a search for systemic failures as well as shared interests, problems, opportunities and capabilities, as suggested in the management literature (Pralahad and Hamel
1990). Consequently, a competence set model is an analytical tool geared towards identifying how different competences of many actors could be integrated with one another both horizontally and vertically in such a way that a constructed set would serve both the entire system and actors embedded into it. The assumption here is that generic competences need to be identified and analysed empirically case by case but a thematic framework is needed to guide the search.
The thematic framework was constructed by identifying studies focusing on innovation system functions, as generic competences are by necessity linked to the most important functions of any innovation system (see Lundvall et al.
2002; Lundvall and Lorenz
2006). In the literature on innovation system functions,
knowledge development and diffusion is, quite self-evidently, acknowledged as a key function (Edquist
2005; Hekkert et al
2007; Hekkert and Negro
2009; Bergek et al
2008; Liu and White
2001). For his part, Eliasson (
2000) does not discuss knowledge development as such, as his theory is dealing more with selection of winning technologies instead of sources of innovation. Most of the key authors include
market formation,
framing and
creation of strategic awareness of new technologies and
mobilisation in their discussion of the key innovation system functions (Edquist
2005; Hekkert et al
2007; Hekkert and Negro
2009; Bergek et al
2008; Jacobsson and Bergek
2004; Rickne
2000). Eliasson (
2000), Hekkert and Negro (
2009) and Bergek et al (
2008) also incorporate in the set of system functions
entrepreneurial activity. Edquist (
2005), Hekkert and Negro (
2009), Bergek et al (
2008) and Rickne (
2000) remind about the importance of
legitimization, and Eliasson and Eliasson (
1996) pay extensive attention to
venture finances. In line with Liu and White (
2001), Eliasson and Eliasson (
1996) add
detection of end-values in the debate while Edquist (
2005), Hekkert and Negro (
2009), Bergek et al
2008, Liu and White (
2001) and Rickne (
2000) emphasise the importance of
interaction by highlighting networking, exchange of knowledge and bringing together complementary knowledge.
Following the close reading of the literature on innovation system functions, the competence set model was constructed to cover seven themes for the empirical work on the generic competences. Framing, mobilisation and networking were left out from the framework, as, instead of being system functions, they were identified as generic capabilities cutting through all the functions, and as such, they are embedded in the core competence thinking as well as the Triple Helix model (see e.g. Russel et al.
2015). Instead, drawing upon Eliasson (
2000) and Liu and White (
2001), industrial production or
systematic production was included in the analysis, as it appears as important in the institutionalisation of innovations. The seven themes are the following: (1) knowledge creation and diffusion, (2) entrepreneurship, (3) finances, (4) legitimisation, (5) market formation, (6) systematic production and (7) identifying potential end-values. It is important to keep in mind that the seven functions, labelled here as themes, are not generic competences as such but they are used in the identification of them. Quite naturally, each of the themes includes a variety of specific capabilities that construct a generic competence. In a system-level analysis, the interaction of identified competences provides further empirical analysis with a point of departure in identifying the specific capabilities in a context of a specific transformation process of a specific Triple Helix constellation.