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This article analyzes important changes in technological innovation in the upstream petroleum industry. It provides evidence that shifts in sectoral patterns of innovation over the petroleum industry's lifecycle from the 1970s up to 2005 were dependent on the dynamics of knowledge base complexity (KBC), a key dimension of an industry's technological regime. Accordingly, observed shifts in innovation patterns are understood to be the aggregated strategic response of industry innovators to changes in the technological regime. The article proposes a quantitative method for exploring KBC and Schumpeterian patterns of innovation, and interactions between the two at the industry level. As the... 

Using network analysis, we investigate if an industry's complex and integrated knowledge base leads to a higher spatial concentration (or dispersal)of innovative activities. This is important because the extant literature provides competing claims about how knowledge base complexity impacts on the spatial distribution of industrial innovation. To help empirically resolve this issue, we draw on longitudinal data (1970–2010)on the upstream petroleum industry and build indexes of entropy and complexity to render knowledge base dynamics, assess the spatial concentration of innovation, and study industry structural transformations. We first find a correlation – once a crucial distinction between...