Marie Ferru

How I Met my Partner: reconsidering Proximities.

The notion of proximity is increasing in popularity in economic and geographic literature, and is now commonly used by scholars in regional science and spatial economics. Few academic works, however, have explored the link between regional development and proximity relations. This comprehensive book redresses the balance with its assessment of the role of, and obstacles caused by, proximity relations in regional development processes.

Proximity Dynamics, Social Networks and Innovation

There is a growing literature dealing with the role of geographical proximity in the innovation process (Storper and Venables, 2004; Moodysson and Jonsson, 2007; Knoben and Oerlemans, 2006; Fitjar ...

Formation Process and Geography of Science-Industry Partnerships: The Case of the University of Poitiers

This paper tries to elicit new explanations into the geography of collaborations between science and industry by focusing on how they are initially set up. Two determining factors could influence this: constraints linked to the search for complementary resources and possibilities to connect with partners. An empirical study on collaborations established by several laboratories of the University of Poitiers with companies confirms this hypothesis. Searching for specific resources means fewer potential partners are available and explains the small number of local collaborations and the high number of partnerships with certain regions. However, these constraints alone do not suffice to determine the spatial scale of such collaborations. Analysing how connections are established particularly reveals that partners generally prefer to renew collaborations rather than initiate new ones. This leads to the existing geography of partnerships being reinforced.

Proximity dynamics and the geography of innovation: diminishing returns or renewal?

Debate about the role of proximity in the innovation process appeared in the early 1990s and was at the core of a small research group composed of French researchers, some from the field of industrial economics and others from regional economics. The originality of the group’s work was therefore not the use of the word itself, but using it with its various meaning, as until then the notion had been understood only in terms of its geographic dimension. The question of the geography of innovation has remained one of the main issues in the work raised by the French School of Proximity. Twenty-five years later, how do we situate all these studies? The paper aims at examining the trajectory of these studies, the stage they have reached in their life cycle: rise, maturity or decline? Is there saturation or renewal? Burnout or resilience? It gives a periodization of studies on proximity based on the publications it has produced and details the specific content of the two periods that we define, before suggesting some avenues for renewal which may lead to a “rebound cycle”.