| This thesis explores the relationships between technological discontinuities, spatial discontinuities and regional industrial concentration through a case study of knowledge formation in the Japanese electronic musical instrument (EMI) industry between 1960 and 1995. The investigation aims to highlight the social and institutional dimensions of innovation that emerge during episodes of radical technological change, specifically in relation to problems posed by transectorial innovation, that is the translation of knowledge from new leading sectors to other industrial sectors. Although largely neglected in economic geography, transectorial innovation is of strategic importance during these episodes because it redefines the technological boundaries of previously stable industrial sectors.;Empirically, the thesis explains how the transition from digital to analog sound synthesis, a technical discontinuity, relates to a spatial shift in the industry's centre of gravity from the US to Japan, in particular to firms located in Hamamatsu, most notably Yamaha and Roland. Successive chapters analyze the rise and fall of the US industry; the ascendancy of Japanese firms; the geography of patent data; the motives, conflicts and consequences of technology transfer for respectively US and Japanese engineers, and; the structure of the EMI production system in Hamamatsu.;The research design is multi-perspective in orientation and draws on primary and secondary sources, the most important of which include interviews with Japanese and US R&D engineers, patent data compiled and analyzed by the author and the translation of Japanese sources such as industry histories and engineering biographies.;The thesis contributes to the industrial geography of Japan by framing Hamamatsu as a learning region that has benefited from synergistic diversification. More generally, for economic geography, it stresses the inseparability of tacit and codified knowledge, but emphasizes the underestimated role that codification, qua translation, plays in mobilizing knowledge in ways that disrupt heretofore settled industrial geographies.;Conceptually, the thesis elaborates on the geographical dimensions of inter-sectoral change in a framework that integrates perspectives from evolutionary economics, especially the idea of techno-economic paradigms; recent research on knowledge transfer including with respect to the idea of 'translation'; and related research in economic geography concerned with problematizing inter-regional innovation networks. |
