Abstract
This study focuses on the roles of informal networks and the actors who participate in business workshops and gatherings in industrial agglomerations in the Hamamatsu area of Shizuoka prefecture, Japan. There are numerous institutions for supporting industry in the Hamamatsu area and they organize workshops and contribute to the development of informal networks. This study applied social network analysis to the relational structures of informal networks using data on actors' participation in business workshops. By making the relational structures visible and measuring the potential of informal networks, the following findings were obtained. First, some specific actors become knowledge carriers because they join multiple business workshops. Those actors may have novel knowledge and valuable market information and therefore play a critical role in innovation processes and developing formal networks such as collaborative R&D projects. Second, although long-term relationships can make the actors homogeneous and inefficient, in the Hamamatsu area they have not fallen into that trap. Long-distance joint actors and multiple participants maintain the fluidity and diversity of business workshops in the Hamamatsu area. They can avoid cognitive lock-in by maintaining channels of novel knowledge and information.
