Page - (000276) - in Knowledge and Networks

273 collective identity, as Staber (2010) has demonstrated for colocated firms in south- ern Germany. Imitation practices can always develop if firms and their employees cooperate with each other or if meetings offer opportunities for mutual observation. For exam- ple, projects are key drivers in imitation processes when companies jointly develop new knowledge and learn from each other, pooling their expertise to arrive at joint solutions. With concrete project results constantly accumulating in the company (Ibert, 2004), it should be easy for the project partners to integrate knowledge from other organizations in the firm’s own knowledge base. Additional key ways in which imitation occurs are employee fluctuation and assignment of employees to multi- company project teams. When employees change their place of work, they contrib- ute their own expertise and solutions to the new company (Malmberg & Power, 2005). As part of the European TSER project, Storper (1999) identified employee mobility as the most important mechanism for the regional exchange of knowledge between companies. In addition, the opportunities for imitating existing solutions are highly varied and are facilitated, for example, through skilled labour mobility within local labour markets, customer-supplier technical and organizational interchange, imitation processes and reverse engineering, exhibition of successful “climatisation” and application to local needs of general purpose technologies, informal “cafeteria” effects, complementary information and specialized services provi- sion. (Camagni, 1991, p. 130) The Taboo of Unfriendly Imitation The conventions of friendly imitation are based on agreement and long-term reci- procity between the partners. There are mutually shared behavioral expectations with which network members comply in order to be accepted in the network perma- nently. If a network member transgresses these conventions, the network members will at least disapprove of this behavior and may even sanction it by excluding the member from communication within the network (Weber, 1922/1978). However, the processes for imitating time-tested solutions are certainly not linked to coopera- tion: “[N]o trust is required as a prerequisite for learning. The sequence of variation, monitoring, comparison, selection and imitation can take place without any close contact or even an arm’s-length interaction between the firms” (Maskell, 2001, p. 930). In these situations specific observation methods such as reverse engineering or other noninteractive spillover effects (Glückler, 2013a) certainly enable firms to imitate and employ tried-and-trusted solutions and innovations from other firms without their agreement and knowledge (Minagawa, Trott, & Hoecht, 2007). This unapproved acquisition of knowledge is what we call unfriendly imitation. Unfriendly imitation violates the convention of eliciting the owner’s agreement when adopting solutions from someone else. Although unfriendly imitation is con- 13 Connectivity in Contiguity