Page - (000216) - in Knowledge and Networks

210 knowledge path may finally form. The more reflective, emphatic, and resourceful the platforming initiative is, the more likely this path-forming will be. To achieve these results, platforming requires certain conditions. It must be efficiently and effectively administered. It must be supported by diligently arranged national and regional FCEs and significant resource endowment (e.g., Germany’s second eco- nomic stimulus package). It must be accompanied by successes (e.g., the creation of new organizations, the launching of R&D projects, and the provision of early infra- structure for electromobility). Platforming also needs a suitable degree of related variety that combines, for instance, a well-prepared top-down approach with a bot- tom-up approach sensitive to regional competencies and political legacies. However, platforming will contribute to path-forming only if it is somewhat consistent with the expectations of the actors in the region and, in particular, their tolerance for change. Until then, platforming will not gain the momentum necessary even to com- plement the present knowledge path, let alone break or replace it (Grabher & Stark, 1997). It has become apparent that platforming activities do not come out of nowhere; they are based on preexisting regional competencies, resources, and knowledge- bases (Asheim et al., 2011). Path-forming as a possible result of platforming can thus be fully understood only if one takes into account the preexisting technologi- cal, institutional, and organizational structures and paths and the constraining or enabling effects (Martin, 2010) they have on intersectorial and interorganizational coordination and learning activities in a regional setting. More precisely, platform- ing may be perceived as the locus of “the interaction of differences” (Cooke, 2012, p. 1419) and of purposeful and generative recombinations of existing activities or relations in a region. Besides the region’s existing resource bases and other resources injected into the process of platforming, cognitive-normative orientations and context- sensitive framing activities seem to be highly important (Giddens, 1984). In the two cases presented in this chapter, wishful thinking (the Berlin region) and collective uncertainty (the Stuttgart region) each had lasting impacts on the early formation of a new knowledge path despite quite effective attempts to reframe it. Take, for instance, the opposing motivations to implement the two regional plat- forms. The creation of the agency eMO in the Berlin region is largely explicable as an effort by regional stakeholders to moderate exaggerated expectations of indus- trial policy and transform them into a practicable approach. By contrast, the found- ing of the agency e-mobilBW in the Stuttgart region is interpretable mainly as the result of trying to convert exaggerated perception of threats into a realistic assess- ment, of seeking to balance protection of the existing industrial structure with encouragement of new technological developments. Whatever the cognitive- normative orientations and intentions behind attempts to promote or prevent the development of a new knowledge path, it seems crucial for the platforming strategy to explicitly address the diversity of stakeholder interests and orientations and allow for serious discourse about them. The two regions we have studied demonstrate that this diversity may, at best, be the source of creativity and novelty. At worst, it can block the collective creation of a proper and superior alternative perhaps needed for J. Sydow and F. Koll