The impact of institutional interactions on cluster response to innovation: The case of Montreal and neural machine translation

Abstract

Despite the importance of institutions in the cluster literature, scholarship has struggled with its conceptualization of institutions, resulting in an incomplete portrait of diverse phenomena. In response, we crystallize a hybrid stream of institutionalism that has emerged in the economic geography literature and propose the construct of institutional interactions to provide structural and relational insight into cluster-wide resistance to innovation. By pairing network analysis with a genealogical study of the Montreal translation cluster, we isolate the impact of institutional interactions and find preliminary support for the redundancies created by institutional brokers and institutional network characteristics. We demonstrate how to use the construct of institutional interactions to diagnose constraints to innovation in an institutional environment.