Opportunities Recognition and Collaborative Networks in Converging Industries: Insights from Sustainability Transitions in Germanies Coal Mining Regions

The necessity to mitigate climate change requires a major transformation of regional economies demanding for novel innovation systems. However, the evolution of a new regional innovation system depends on the capability of entrepreneurial actors to integrate distant knowledge and to recognize opportunities in novel inter-industry segments. This book chapter explores entrepreneurial opportunity recognition in a setting of inter-industry fields that emerge from the integration of hitherto unrelated fields. We draw upon the case of the German high-tech network “INNOSpace®2Agriculture” characterized by the collaboration of heterogeneous actors that need to remove existing barriers due to cognitive distances between different industry sectors (Space and Agriculture). We elaborate a new role of start-ups as a mediator between hitherto separated industry sectors. This book chapter contributes to the research body of opportunity recognition by shedding light on the particularities of cross-sectoral collaboration of partners from distant knowledge fields.