Beyond dependent development? The unlikely emergence of an upgrading alliance in the case of InoBat in Slovakia

Semi-peripheral economies are disproportionately reliant on foreign capital for innovation and upgrading into higher-value added economic activities. This characteristic of dependent development is coupled with unreliable government support for domestic businesses, resulting in fragmented state-business ties. How then did a local electrical vehicle (EV) battery startup InoBat manage to build an upgrading alliance in Slovakia and capitalise on the accelerating automotive shift to electromobility despite these barriers being present in the semi-peripheral economy of Slovakia? By developing a network-based analytical approach and using the unlikely case study of InoBat, this paper argues that developmental entrepreneurship, the mobilisation of private sector resources by venture capital or a large domestic firm, and support by private-public institutions were key determinants for the emergence of the InoBat upgrading alliance. The findings underline that local firms can also be the drivers of upgrading efforts even in the absence of consistent government support and heavy presence of large transnational corporations.