Innovation and regional economic development: A matter of perspective?

This paper investigates the issue of innovation policy within a regional context. It is presented that the perspective one takes is important both in how one interprets the processes and relationships involved, but also in the way one identifies barriers and problems in policy formation and how one resolves them. The paper explores a number of contrasting perspectives in relation to innovation policy and the regions and seeks to highlight the implications of this both for policy, but also in the development of our conceptual understanding about innovation and geography.     

Technology policy and the regions — the case of the BioRegio contest

Only recently, it has been argued that technology policy should give more attention to the regions as they could play a key role in the process of technological change. The German Federal Government has tried to do so by initiating a contest in which Germany's leading Biotech regions competed for a given amount of public funding. This paper reports on the aims, the conceptual design and the results of the BioRegio contest (BRC) and tries to place it into a broader theoretical context. It is shown that the new policy instrument cannot solve the fundamental information problem associated with government intervention into the process of technological change, but that it goes into the right direction by taking the regions seriously and giving prominence to the well-functioning interplay of the various elements of regional innovation systems.     

Creativity and regional innovation: Evidence from EU regions

We analyse the role of creative workers in the region as a source and foundational element of regional innovation in the European Union. We show the empirical relevance of this factor – which we label inspiration – within the structure of a recursive model of regional innovation for a set of 83 European regions. We show that, when differentiated from the presence of regional intelligence – as measured by the availability of human capital – and from technological infrastructure, inspiration, along with the degree of development of national and regional institutions, has the strongest direct and indirect effects on regional patenting activity.     

“兰白都市经济圈”创新系统协同发展研究

本文基于2006—2011年数据,依据系统协同学原理构建了"兰白都市经济圈"区域创新系统协同测度模型,从区域创新投入子系统、产出子系统、扩散子系统与支持子系统四个方面对兰白都市经济圈区域创新系统发展的协调状况进行量化评价,并对影响要素进行分析。最后,对加快提升兰白都市经济圈的创新协同发展能力提出了针对性的政策建议。     

创新能力、创新溢出对经济增长的动态影响研究

技术创新对经济发展有重要的影响,技术创新与经济发展的关系也得到学术界和产业界的重视。大多数学者关注的是技术创新对经济发展的影响机制,但是关于两者之间动态关系的研究却较少。本研究利用计量方法分析北京1999-2016年的数据,发现创新能力和创新溢出对经济的影响都是正向的,且技术创新对经济的正向影响在技术出现的2年内缓慢增长,然后稳定在一定的比例,这种影响呈现6年一个小周期的特点。创新溢出对经济增长的影响在10年以内都是处于缓慢增长的状态。最后,文章基于实证研究结论提出了政策建议和措施。     

Policies for science, technology and innovation: Translating rationales into regional policies in a multi-level setting

Departing from a number of theoretical perspectives from which rationales for science, technology and innovation (STI) policy can be extracted, this paper discusses three questions. First, what rationales for public intervention can be derived from different economic theories, including theories usually associated with spatial dynamics and territorial relationships? Second, what policy instruments or policy-mixes can be associated with the various rationales? Third, what do these theories and associated rationales tell us about the territorial level or levels at which STI policies can usefully be designed and implemented?     

Regulatory policy as innovation: Constructing rules of engagement for a technological zone of tissue engineering in the European Union

This paper addresses the question of the part that regulation plays in processes of innovation in sectors of technology. The politico-economic phenomenon of ‘Europe’ is partly constituted by regulatory regime-building, and new technologies are one of the major sites of regime-building. A constructionist social theory perspective shows that study of the conflictual processes of regulatory policymaking affords insights into the formation of the rules of engagement that constitute technology domains. Adopting the concept of emergent ‘technological zone’ in preference to industrial ‘sector’ or technoscientific network, the paper presents, using empirical research, a detailed account of the case of the debate and development of regulatory policy for therapeutic tissue engineering in the European Union's policy institutions and stakeholder networks. It describes how the jurisdiction of an emergent zone has been formed through such negotiations, providing a counter-example to the common view that regulation ‘lags behind’ innovation. The analysis takes account particularly of the part played by the malleability of the definition of the material technology itself in such constructive governance processes, and it also suggests various consequences for the array of producers of the technology, for market structuring and for the innovation pathways taken by tissue engineering technology. Concluding, the paper argues that there is conceptual advance to be made by bringing together constructionist social theory with innovation studies approaches that highlight the part played by non-firm, public institutions in shaping innovation ecologies.     

Policy learning and innovation theory: an interactive and co-evolving process

This paper explores links between the development of innovation theory since the late 1970s, and the evolution of innovation policy ideas, primarily in the 1990s. The argument is that there is a close connection between theory and policy, so that theory and policy learning can be seen as an integrated, co-evolving and interactive process. We analyse the theory-policy learning link in terms of two phases. We suggest that the complex economic crisis of the 1970s created an opening for rival analyses of events. During the 1980s, the development of evolutionary theories (pioneered by Nelson and Winter) and of empirically-based theories of the innovation process (pioneered by Nathan Rosenberg) created a framework in which policy agencies could consider heterodox ideas concerning objectives and instruments of public policy. By the early 1990s policy-makers, particularly in Europe, came to see RTD and innovation policies not just as important arenas of action in themselves, but as instruments towards more wide ranging policy objectives. The policy agencies involved, though hierarchical, were characterised by relatively open structures that permitted a degree of intellectual diversity: so organisations like the OECD and the European Commission played a central role, whereas the World Bank, for example, did not. Increasing policy interest stimulated a second phase of research in the 1990s, sponsored both nationally and by various EU programmes, in which expanding the innovation-oriented knowledge base became a significant objective for policy-makers. The paper argues that the theory-policy link has been central to the intellectual development of this field, which would have been impossible within the constraints of existing disciplinary structures and university funding systems. At the same time the analytical achievements have permitted a wide expansion in the conceptualization of policy targets and in the design of instruments available to policy-makers. In a sense, this is itself an evolutionary story: of a crisis and a conjunctural niche that permitted the creation and (so far) survival of a set of diverse and certainly non-conventional ideas.     

The innovation–economic growth nexus: Global evidence

This paper extends the line of research attempting to link innovation to economic growth by addressing some unexplored questions. Using global patent data, this paper empirically investigates the importance of both the quantity and quality of innovation on economic growth, controlling for past measures of inventive inputs. Moreover, our research examines how innovation inputs can be translated into per capita growth under the various economic structures and stages of economic development. Based on a sample of 58 countries for the period 1980–2003, our empirical results indicate that countries hosting firms with higher quality patents also have higher economic growth. Furthermore, we have some evidence that those countries that increase the level of patenting also witness a concomitant increase in economic growth.     

创新型新疆建设进程评价研究

建设创新型新疆不仅是实现创新型国家宏伟目标的内在要求,同时也是加速新疆工业化、转变经济增长方式、缩小区域差距和实现经济社会跨越式发展的必然选择。本文以创新型省份指标体系为基础,对创新型新疆建设进程进行评价。结果表明,创新型新疆建设进程尚未过半,企业创新能力不足是影响创新型新疆建设进程最主要的短板。     

Non-technological regulatory effects: Implications for innovation and innovation policy

This paper considers the link between public policy and innovation and contributes to the notion that public policies that do not directly address innovation carry along important implications for it. It explores the role of regulation for innovation and innovation policy by emphasizing the importance of non-technological regulatory effects for innovation and their potential as an input for innovation policy. The output of in depth interviews with stakeholders from the detergents industry is combined with various sources of secondary data and reveals a variety of non-technological novelties attributed to regulation that are relevant to innovation. These results are then matched against the objectives of innovation policy, an exercise that gives better insights on the policy links between regulation and innovation policy and concludes on the domains of complementarities between the two. We find that that regulatory policy can contribute to the achievement of targets set by innovation policy while innovation policy measures can facilitate the compensation of negative regulatory implications for innovation.     

蓝色经济区背景下烟台发展服务机器人产业的战略构想

知识经济的发展和老龄化社会的到来,导致未来社会对服务机器人巨大需求,从而形成了以智能技术等高新技术为代表而集成的服务机器人产业。本文对烟台建设高端产业集聚区、构建技术创新型城市群、实现从“制造优势”到“设计优势”进而实现“创造优势”的转变,必须从产业升级和技术创新角度入手,提出了发展服务机器人产业的必要性,探讨了其可行性,并根据本地区的特点,给出了实现服务机器人产业化的途径,最终目标是形成点-链-群三层网络架构的技术创新型城市。     

Towards system oriented innovation policy evaluation? Evidence from EU28 member states

Many years after the introduction of the innovation system concept in innovation policy design, it is still not clear whether innovation policy evaluation practices follow a system approach. Building on evaluation and innovation studies, this article develops the concept ‘system oriented innovation policy evaluation’ based on four attributes (coverage, perspective, temporality and expertise). The attributes are used as analytical devices for gathering extensive empirical evidence on the actual practices of EU28 member states. The findings show that few countries have developed a type of innovation policy evaluation that is system oriented. The advent of a system approach to innovation policy evaluation offers the opportunity of comprehensive, contextualized and evidence-based innovation policy-making. However, there are still serious obstacles as such an approach requires important knowledge and organisational capacities. Overcoming these obstacles would need more decided evaluation capacity-building at the national level.     

可供性驱动下大企业新事业竞争优势的形成与演化——基于特锐德的纵向案例研究

数字技术的快速发展,催生新一轮公司创业的浪潮,越来越多的大企业致力于新事业开发,解决企业增长乏力的问题。然而,理论界对于大企业如何进行新事业开发并构建基于新事业的持续竞争优势的问题并没有得到较为深入的回答。本文基于可供性理论,探讨聚焦特定场景下的可供性如何影响大企业新事业竞争优势的形成与演化。通过对特锐德的案例进行分析,结果表明：大企业新事业开发的过程是动态复杂的,需要分阶段分重点完成;在大企业新事业开发的不同阶段,聚焦于特定场景的专用技术可供性和数字技术可供性表现出不同的特征,二者并非彼此独立,而是相互作用,推动了企业创新生态系统互动形式的演化;在不同特征的专用技术可供性和数字技术可供性的作用下,大企业可以通过创新生态系统互动形式的变化,推动大企业基于新事业的竞争优势的形成与演化,实现先发优势、差异化优势到生态优势的转变。研究发现丰富和拓展了技术可供性、创新生态系统与公司创业相关的文献,对于大企业开展新事业开发具有启发和指导意义。     

模块重构:构建我国国家创新系统的新思路

运用模块和模块化思想，分析了我国国家创新系统现状，指出存在的问题在于创新系统演进模式不能适应经济全球化的需求。最后引入模块重构概念，提出了推进国家创新系统建设的新思路。     

创新政策研究支持系统构建

针对创新政策研究中存在的问题，提出了创新政策研究支持系统的概念，并构建了其框架结构。它是为创新政策研究人员的学习、研究提供支持的资源共享互动平台，包括创新政策理论、创新政策工具、创新政策研究基础数据库、创新政策研究、技术支撑平台等主要模块：对系统的主要模块进行了详细设计，并指出了系统的特点和功能。     

Policy mixes for sustainability transitions: New approaches and insights through bridging innovation and policy studies

There has been an increasing interest in science, technology and innovation policy studies in the topic of policy mixes. While earlier studies conceptualised policy mixes mainly in terms of combinations of instruments to support innovation, more recent literature extends the focus to how policy mixes can foster sustainability transitions. For this, broader policy mix conceptualisations have emerged which also include considerations of policy goals and policy strategies; policy mix characteristics such as consistency, coherence, credibility and comprehensiveness; as well as policy making and implementation processes. It is these broader conceptualisations of policy mixes which are the subject of the special issue introduced in this article. We aim at supporting the emergence of a new strand of interdisciplinary social science research on policy mixes which combines approaches, methods and insights from innovation and policy studies to further such broader policy mix research with a specific focus on fostering sustainability transitions. In this article we introduce this topic and present a bibliometric analysis of the literature on policy mixes in both fields as well as their emerging connections. We also introduce five major themes in the policy mix literature and summarise the contributions made by the articles in the special issue to these: methodological advances; policy making and implementation; actors and agency; evaluating policy mixes; and the co-evolution of policy mixes and socio-technical systems. We conclude by summarising key insights for policy making.     

Emergence and evolution of new industries: The path-dependent dynamics of knowledge creation. An introduction to the special section

In this introduction, we review the arguments that underpin the rationale for the special section, and provide a structured sequence for the contents of the six selected papers that comprise the section.     

Questioning two myths in innovation literature

Which knowledge is most important in the completion of innovative processes? In which contexts does such knowledge develop? The combination of an in-depth case study, theory and reasoning formed the platform from which conclusions could be drawn. One conclusion is that the strategic knowledge necessary for innovation not only concerns technology. It is rather about business intelligence, funding, marketing and other non-technical areas. Moreover, the production and development of frontline knowledge and research is not the sole province of universities. In many areas, companies are far ahead of universities. Both conclusions differ from the assumptions in mainstream innovation literature.     

Innovation on demand—Can public procurement drive market success of innovations?

Public procurement has been at the centre of recent discussions on innovation policy. We embed it into the broader framework of public policies to stimulate innovation: regulations, R&D subsidies and basic research at universities. We synthesize the characteristics of all four instruments conceptionally and quantitatively compare their effects on innovation success for 1100 firms in Germany. We find that public procurement and knowledge spillovers from universities propel innovation success equally. The benefits of university knowledge apply uniformly to all firms. However, public procurement is especially effective for smaller firms in regions under economic stress and in distributive or technological services.