Constructing Regional Advantage: Towards State-of-the-Art Regional Innovation System Policies in Europe?

Details: Globalisation pressures force European regions to enhance their competitiveness. The capability of regions to generate, apply and exploit new knowledge and to innovate has become a key factor of their competitiveness. Often, such competitive advantages do not emerge spontaneously, but are the results of collective actions and initiatives taken by firms, research organizations and governments at various levels. Regions are considered a key level where innovation processes are shaped, coordinated and governed through localized capabilities such as specialized resources, skills, institutions and common social and cultural values.

Concomitantly a more system (cluster and RIS)-oriented regional innovation policy has emerged to construct regional advantage. However, policies for constructing regional advantage cannot be based on one “best practice” model but should reflect the different conditions and problems of the respective regions and RIS. These vary e.g. between types of RIS (such as institutionally “thick” or “thin” RIS; networked or fragmented RIS) as well as the dominating knowledge base of local industries (analytical, synthetic, symbolic). So far very little is known on how policies for constructing regional advantage can work in such different settings. The proposed project aims at filling this gap by comparing policy initiatives in different regional, institutional and sectoral settings.