Title: Using social network analysis to identify innovation clusters

Authors: Kristijan Breznik

Addresses: International School for Social and Business Studies, 7 Mariborska cesta, 3000 Celje, Slovenia

Abstract: The government of the Republic of Slovenia encourages the cooperation between organisations with three types of research centres: competence centres, centres of excellence, and development centres. These three types of networking mechanisms together with research organisations generate two-mode network. With the information obtained from the membership in the networking mechanisms, we constructed weighted and undirected one-mode network of Slovenian research organisations. Furthermore, we instructively provided the methodology which was applied to: establish the innovation one-mode network, obtain the innovation clusters, and classify actors-units (research organisations) in the resulting clusters. The following three centrality measures were used in the paper: degree, betweenness and closeness. In this way, the most important Slovenian research organisations in the field of innovation and knowledge production were revealed. Results confirm two significant indicators in Slovenian research development, regional affiliation and industrial sector membership.

Keywords: social network analysis; SNA; cluster identifation; innovation clusters; network centrality measures; research centres; competence centres; centres of excellence; development centres; two-mode networks; Slovenia; research organisations; research development; regional affiliation; industrial sector.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIL.2016.075654

International Journal of Innovation and Learning, 2016 Vol.19 No.3, pp.272 - 285

Received: 14 Aug 2014
Accepted: 25 Sep 2014
Published online: 31 Mar 2016 *

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