Logistics innovation in Seaports: An inter-organizational perspective

Innovation has become the most important driver of firm competitiveness in advanced economies. In today's competitive environment, firms need to complement technological innovation with non-technological innovation concerning services, people and organization in order to survive and prosper. It is widely acknowledged that innovations emerge in social interactions in which diverse actors share complementary knowledge and therefore is best developed and sustained in the long term by knowledge-intensive inter-firm relationships. At this regard, this paper aims at contributing to research in this area by focusing on the role of inter-organizational relationships for innovation in seaports; indeed, seaports provide a rich, though unexplored, field to understand the interactive nature of innovation given the multiple and strong interdependencies among port operators and firms of the regional economic system. The paper proceeds deductively by applying theoretical notions about logistics innovation to seaports and inductively by presenting specific cases of seaports that have realized logistics innovations.