**6. Conclusive remarks**

In this chapter, we have sought to review and analyze the links between the concepts of resilience and innovation.

During the Great Recession, which started with the financial downturn of 2008, the term resilience had increasingly gained traction in the social sciences to investigate how an entity responds to a destabilizing shock. The notion of resilience has been studied by using a variety of approaches. The definitions of engineering and ecological resilience, however, fail to grasp resilience as much broader than just assessing the capacity of an economy to recover from an unforeseeable disturbance and to bounce back to the pre-crisis equilibrium conditions. Therefore, in this essay, we focused particularly on the evolutionary conceptualization: adaptive resilience. According to evolutionary economic geography scholars, it involves the regional economies' capacity to recover from an exogenous disturbance as well as the ability of their industrial and technological structure to continuously evolve by creating new growth path. Following this line of inquiry, Simmie and Martin [3] argued that resilience is "an ongoing process rather than a recovery to a (pre-existing or new) stable equilibrium state" (p. 31).

Following an evolutionary approach, we argued that innovation is among the key drivers of economies' abilities to be resilient throughout external shock. This idea has important antecedent: Schumpeter [5] claimed that innovation drives economic recovery following phases of recession. Nonetheless, the notion of innovation has been investigated by a wide array of disciplines, with Schumpeterian theories alone adopting different perspectives. Schumpeter, indeed, proposed two different conceptualizations of innovation. The first (Schumpeter Mark I) places the businessman as the agent of change that, by creating a new firm, prompts radical innovations in the economic system. On the contrary, in the Schumpeter Mark II theory, the innovative process is based on highly coordinated approaches of incremental accumulation undertaken within very large firms.

Following this line of inquiry, evolutionary scholars claimed that innovation is a complex process driven by knowledge based on the development and on the commercial exploitation of new ideas for a process or product that plays a fundamental role in generating wealth and profitability [7]. In this context, new knowledge is endogenously created, shared, and recombined through endless dynamics of interactive learning among co-localized agents. As a consequence, innovations involve a wide variety of agents, and it turns out to be a collective and cumulative process with evolutionary trajectories [6] and geographically grounded roots.

Entrepreneurship occupies a prominent position in the Schumpeterian theory of innovation as well as in the research agendas of several literatures. Thus, to fully comprehend the complex relationships between resilience and innovation, we examined the ample spectrum as well of meaning that entrepreneurship assumes according to

## *Resilience and Innovation: A Conceptual Approach DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.113842*

the economic, approaches. Contrary to previous research (among others, [3]), we argued that entrepreneurship influences adaptive resilience only when involves the exploitation of innovative knowledge. In this context, we claimed that entrepreneurship shapes regional economies' ability to create innovative growth path only in the case that the decision to set up a new company is embedded in the local new knowledge value chain. This conjecture finds its root in the latest Schumpeter works. The author, indeed, in his book Business Cycle [5] argued that entrepreneurship identifies with the specific function of introducing innovations [8]. In this context, a system's intrinsic features play a fundamental role in enabling (or disabling) the generation of innovative growth paths. According to Schumpeter [19], creative responses are based both on entrepreneurial actions and on adequate levels of knowledge externalities at a system level [19].

Cambridge high-tech cluster and Sassuolo tile district represent anecdotal examples of a local system that, thanks to the dynamic interaction between the endogenously created new knowledge and a class of conscious entrepreneurs that commercially exploit it, has been able to be adaptively resilient throughout exogenous shocks.

Drawing from this last evidence and our conceptual framework, policies that aim at fostering resilience should be characterized by intentional and careful coordination mechanisms between the agents that, through research and innovation efforts, create new knowledge and the ones that, by creating a new firm, transform it into marketable products. Thus, policymakers should implement *ad hoc* strategies favoring, at the same time, the emergence of innovative routines based on local specificity and the creation of a class of entrepreneurs able to exploit them.

The conceptual framework developed in this article provided one possible, albeit limited, ground for further theoretical developments and empirical explorations on this intriguing topic.
