Abstract Trade fairs operate as temporary clusters and temporary markets that bring together representatives from an organizational field for the purpose of making business and exchanging knowledge. Intrinsic to these events and the global buzz they generate are innovation dynamics, wherein participants’ desire to become more effective in finding transaction partners, leading to continuous product changes. Search processes for new products and technologies at these events tend to prioritize choices that fit the specific production context of searching firms and create a trend toward technological specialization within larger production systems, instead of automatically driving convergence. All of this suggests that market and production relations should not be viewed as being separated, as in much contemporary work, but as fundamentally linked, and that trade fairs play a critical role in creating this connection between market and innovation dynamics.
Bathelt et al. (Wed,) studied this question.