Philip Cooke

Dark and Light: Entrepreneurship and Innovation in New Technology Spaces

Notable changes to human comfort are underway that add greatly to the complexity of existential processes. These are «inter-ethnic violence» and «economic polarisation». Historically, these have resisted resilience from urban recovery in intractable contexts. Among the «wicked problems» confronting future actors and agents of newly emerging frontiers of research and policy are those addressing the «dark side» of innovation and entrepreneurship. This is seldom studied in economic geography but such are the negativities associated with so many dimensions of not only technology but its deformations and inhuman inversions that there will, for sure, be future growth for a wide range of social, natural, applied sciences and technology fixes for human dilemmas into the foreseeable future. We consider «resilience» in prefatory remarks on two intractable cases. Contrariwise, in this brief paper on «new technological spaces», attention is devoted to two new «cybersecurity» spatial types, each of which consists in an under-explored «dark side». In this, not in the long term, the naturally optimistic research outlook of the academic will be obscured by the demands of a more pessimistic outlook for the short term. Two of our selected sub-fields, in cyber-security and structured finance, reference both the «dark web» for illegal and terroristic communication and «dark pools». The paper reviews the economic geographies of these «apocalypses» and draw conclusions.

Keywords: new technological spaces; innovation systems; entrepreneurial ecosystems; resilience