A kairos constellation designates a temporarily existing opportunity for a group of actors to take advantage of a coincidence of favourable circumstances in order to realise a shared target. Starting from the observation that kairos constellations are ubiquitous in human individual and social life, the research question of this paper is how the Triple Helix and the wider innovation policy research literature deals with such constellations. The authors develop a conceptual framework for kairos constellations and discuss empirical evidence that kairos constellations have been scrutinized in innovation research literature. Then, the concept is applied to an example from the Triple Helix – based cluster policy. The key message of this paper is that Triple Helix researchers should systematically study kairos constellations because they are a critical force in the evolution of innovations systems as well as business firms, which has not yet been systematically examined.

kairos星座为一组参与者指定一个暂时存在的机会，以利用巧合的有利环境来实现共同的目标。从kairos星座在人类个体和社会生活中无处不在的观察出发，本文的研究问题是三螺旋和更广泛的创新政策研究文献如何处理这些星座。作者为kairos星座开发了一个概念框架，并讨论了kairos的经验证据星座已在创新研究文献中得到详细审查。然后，将该概念应用于基于 Triple Helix 的集群策略的示例。这篇论文的关键信息是，三螺旋研究人员应该系统地研究kairos星座，因为它们是创新系统和商业公司进化的关键力量，而这还没有被系统地研究过。