Innovation and R&D spillover effects in Spanish regions: A spatial approach

This paper analyses the spatial patterns of innovation, its regional interdependencies and evolution, as well as its role in determining local innovation in Spanish regions. Results indicate the suitability of a trade-based regional proximity when considering spatial spillovers in innovation. In this context, not only local capacity is relevant in determining domestic innovation, but also spatial innovation spillovers, which result mainly from efforts in both higher education and public administration. Moreover, a minimum level of regional development is required to improve the effectiveness of R&D policies. Therefore, it is necessary for R&D policies to act in combination with other policies focused on the improvement of socio-economic and structural determinants of regional innovative performance.     

Innovation in regions: What does really matter?

The literature on systems of innovation conceptualises innovation as an evolutionary and social process of collective learning. But three main questions remain open: is this learning process rather internal or external? What are the boundaries of this process? Is this social process voluntary or rather unintended? This paper strives to tackle those questions by analysing the determinants of regional innovative levels in French manufacturing industries. By estimating a knowledge production function we find that building external interactions is of greater importance than developing internal innovative competences. Second, unintended knowledge flows have less influence on regional innovative performance than deliberate ones. Lastly, the French innovation system looks regional rather than sectoral.     

区域创新战略:欧盟的实践与启示

区域创新战略是欧盟旨在帮助非核心区域在科研、技术开发和创新等领域进行赶超的重要举措.在分析欧盟区域创新战略的背景、本质、目标的基础上,通过三个案例研究,探讨了基于不同区域历史文化背景的区域创新战略的发展方法,并得出了一些政策启示.     

中国与主要创新经济体创新能力的国际比较:基于欧盟创新指数的分析

2006年我国提出了建设创新型国家的战略目标,未来10年是中国建设创新型国家的关键时期。本文基于欧盟创新指数报告2006至2010年的年度报告,定量分析了1995年、2004年及2005年中国创新能力在主要R&D支出国中的排名情况,比较分析了2006至2010年中国创新能力与美国、日本及欧盟的差距,比较分析了2006至2010年中国创新能力与俄罗斯、印度及巴西的差异。研究结果显示,中国的创新能力在主要R&D支出国中排名靠后,与美国、日本和欧盟有非常大的差距,在金砖四国中明显低于俄罗斯,与巴西和印度比较接近。本文的研究对于了解中国创新型国家建设现状,推进中国创新型国家建设有重要的意义。     

欠发达地区人才引进风险及对策研究

在信息经济时代,欠发达地区逐年加大对人才和智力的引进工作,但人才引进工作受地方环境和人才管理等因素的影响,人才引进风险日益加剧。切实树立风险意识,对人才引进工作的各类风险进行分析,要从人才战略规划、管理机制、引进方式、人才继任计划等方面进行综合管控,并采取积极的措施进行防范,切实保证人才引进工作的效率和质量,从而促进人才兴业。     

欧盟创新指数研究进展

为提升创新能力,欧盟从2001年开始正式推出欧盟国家创新指数报告.本文首先介绍了欧盟国家创新指数报告的演化过程,然后分析了近年来专家学者对欧盟国家创新指数的意见与建议,最后总结了未来三年欧盟创新指数的改进与变化.     

The complex nature of regional knowledge production: Evidence on European regions

Knowledge creation is widely considered as the central driver for innovation, and accordingly, for creating competitive advantage. However, most measurement approaches have so far mainly focused on the quantitative dimension of knowledge creation, neglecting that not all knowledge has the same value (Balland and Rigby, 2017). The notion of knowledge complexity has come into use in this context just recently as an attempt to measure the quality of knowledge in terms of its uniqueness and its replicability. The central underlying assumption is that more complex knowledge is more difficult to be replicated, and therefore provides a higher competitive advantage for firms, or at an aggregated level, regions and countries. The objective of this study is to advance and apply measures for regional knowledge complexity to a set of European regions, and to highlight its potential in a regional policy context. This is done by, first, characterising the spatial distribution of complex knowledge in Europe and its dynamics in recent years, second, establishing that knowledge complexity is associated with future regional economic growth, and third, illustrating the usefulness of the measures by means of some policy relevant example applications. We proxy the production of complex knowledge with a regional knowledge complexity index (KCI) that is based on regional patent data of European metropolitan regions from current EU and EFTA member countries. The results are promising as the regional KCI unveils knowledge creation patterns not observed by conventional measures. Moreover, regional complexity measures can be easily combined with relatedness metrics to support policy makers in a smart specialisation context.     

R&D offshoring and the productivity growth of European regions

The recent increase in R&D offshoring has raised fears that knowledge and competitiveness in advanced countries may be at risk of ‘hollowing out’. At the same time, economic research has stressed that this process is also likely to allow some reverse technology transfer and foster growth at home. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the extent to which R&D offshoring is associated with productivity dynamics of European regions.     

E-government implementation strategies in developed and transition economies: A comparative study

In the last decade, electronic government in Europe has emerged and established itself as a viable alternative channel for public service delivery. While e-government has now matured in most developed European countries, transition economies in Europe, have only recently begun to recognise its potential benefits and incorporated e-government as part of their national strategy. Although time may result in the amplification of e-government experience for transition economy countries, lessons drawn from developed countries indicate that political, fiscal, social, strategic and organisational issues need to be addressed when formulating plans for deploying e-government. Using case study research, this paper examines strategies adopted by the UK and Slovakia in the context of e-government implementation. Particularly, the paper examines how the perspectives on e-government vision, strategy, focus and related organisational change influence the implementation and diffusion of e-government in developed and transition economies in Europe.     

Innovation patterns and location of European low- and medium-technology industries

Does a specific innovation pattern of low- and medium-low-technology (LMT) industries exist, and if so, can this pattern be the basis for autonomous, economically successful development? This study based on Fourth Community Innovation Survey (CIS4) data finds, as predicted by Pavitt [Pavitt, K., 1984. Sectoral patterns of technical change: towards a taxonomy and a theory. Research Policy 13, 343-373], that LMT industries are characterised by process, organisational and marketing innovations, by weak internal innovation capabilities and by strong dependencies on the external provision of machines, equipment and software. Suppliers are the most important source for their information and knowledge. On the one hand, firms in LMT industries are an essential pillar of advanced industrial regions. On the other hand, an alternative growth path-based predominantly on LMT industries does not appear to exist. LMT industries are shrinking in Western Europe and companies in these industries are relocating to Eastern Europe. In general, regions with a high proportion of LMT industries have a lower gross domestic product, though so do regions with high proportions of high- and medium-high-technology industries. The economic potential of regions specialised in knowledge-intensive services and characterised by high employment rates and qualified employees is higher than that of industrial regions.     

Inbound Open Innovation and Innovation Performance: A Robustness Study

In studies of firm's innovation performance, regression analysis can involve a significant level of model uncertainty because the ‘true’ model, and therefore the appropriate set of explanatory variables are unknown. Drawing on innovation survey data for France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we assess the robustness of the literature on inbound open innovation to variable selection choices, using Bayesian model averaging (BMA). We investigate a wide range of innovation determinants proposed in the literature and establish a robust set of findings for the variables related to the introduction of new-to-the-firm and new-to-the-world innovation with the aim of gauging the overall healthiness of the literature. Overall, we find greater robustness for explanations for new-to-the-firm rather than new-to-the-world innovation. We explore how this approach might help to improve our understanding of innovation.     

Strategic interactions in public R&D across European countries: A spatial econometric analysis

The paper adds to the existing literature on the determinants of government spending in Research and Development (R&D) by considering the role of strategic interactions among countries as one of the possible competing explanations, within a spatial econometric framework. We account for several factors affecting national levels of public R&D spending, including (i) the international context – i.e. Lisbon strategy; (ii) country characteristics – level of private R&D, GDP, trade openness and the National System of Innovation; (iii) countries’ similarities in relation to (a) trade and economic size and (b) sectoral specialization. The analysis is carried out on 14 European countries. First, we find that factors traditionally affecting the level of public R&D expenditure, such as the scale of the national economy, trade openness, sectoral specialization and private R&D, significantly influence the level of public R&D in European countries between 1994 and 2006. Interestingly, the introduction of the Lisbon strategy does not seem to have affected changes in the levels of public R&D spending. Second, by using different weight matrices, we confirm the existence of strategic interactions in relation to R&D spending among European countries with similar economic, international trade and sectoral structure characteristics, though not geographically close.     

R&D, higher education and regional growth: Uneven linkages among European regions

This paper examines the relationship between the economic growth of European regions and their knowledge and human capital endowments. The share of adult population with tertiary education and the intensity of R&D expenditures in value-added emerge as the most effective factors enhancing the growth of GDP per capita recorded, during 1995–2002, by the regions belonging to twelve countries of the former EU15. However, while the educational variable is effective for the whole regional set, the impact of R&D is significant only for the regions that are above a given threshold of per capita GDP. Moreover, remarkable disparities arise among the regions of different countries. In particular, only within North European countries there is a significant relationship between regional growth and the intensity of R&D and higher education. The policy implications of both findings are discussed.     

The ability of European regions to diversify in renewable energies: The role of technological relatedness

Despite the global consensus about the growing significance of renewables, the regional drivers of innovation in these unique and novel technologies have been widely neglected in the literature. In this paper, we show that renewable energy (RE) inventions differ from other green inventions in the knowledge recombination processes leading to their generation as well as in their impact on subsequent inventions. The evidence on these specificities of RE technologies allows us hypothesizing that regional branching in renewables may rely on relatedness differently than other non-RE green technologies. In checking this hypothesis, we use a data set spanning the period 1981-2015 covering 277 European NUTS2 regions in the EU28 countries plus Norway. We obtain that relatedness is highly relevant in explaining regional specialization in RE, and more relevant than for other green technologies, which we associate to the lower generality in their impact and the narrower scope of the knowledge from which they nurture. This conclusion is maintained when considering separately regions with high and low development levels. However, the impact of relatedness increases for RE as the regional economic development decreases, signalling that a low endowment of resources and capabilities does not allow the region to break from its past technological specialization, depending more on relatedness. This would not be the case for other green technologies, probably due to their higher level of generality and wider scope.     

欧洲研究区:泛区域创新系统理论的实践探索

创新理论经历了从线性创新理论到创新系统理论的发展,随着全球经济发展的区域化趋势加强及相邻国家科技合作的增多,跨国的泛区域创新系统理论开始产生,其主要是研究在跨越国界的创新系统内各创新主体有益互动的机制,以使知识要素在系统中有效流动,最终提高系统的整体创新能力。欧盟于2000年提出的欧洲研究区实质是一个在欧盟成员国之间形成的泛区域创新系统,欧盟在推进欧洲研究区的进程中对治理模式及治理工具的探索及应用是对泛区域创新系统理论的有益实践探索,对我国探索国际科技创新合作机制具有启示意义。     

Innovation in UK higher education: A panel data analysis of undergraduate degree programmes

In the UK, higher education is increasingly a marketised service sharing many characteristics with other professional services such as legal, medical or financial services. With marketisation comes competition, and the need for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to develop and maintain strong programmes to attract and retain high-class faculty and fee-paying students. Here, we consider the drivers of programme innovation ? i.e. the introduction of new programmes and the withdrawal of existing programmes ? in UK universities. Our focus is on undergraduate programmes as these account for three-quarters of all student enrolments. Using panel data for UK universities we identify significant resource, internationalisation and business engagement effects. Financial stringency and more extensive international market engagement both encourage programme introduction. Collaboration with businesses has offsetting effects depending on the nature of the interaction. The results have both strategic and systemic implications.     

欧洲创新集群的发展及对我国的借鉴

在知识经济的今天,创新集群在推动经济发展中的重要地位日益突显。通过对欧洲创新集群发展情况的介绍,分析欧洲创新集群成功的内外因素,提出了对我国发展创新集群的相关建议。     

《欧洲创新计分牌(EIS)2007》报告概述及其启示

《欧洲创新计分牌》年度报告是目前国际上比较国家间创新绩效的较权威的出版物之一。在对2008年2月14日最新出版的《欧洲创新计分牌2007:创新绩效的比较分析》报告进行译介的基础上,文章总结出了报告的八条主要研究结论,同时就其结论对区域建设创新型城市提出了相关启示和建议,包括完善区域创新体系和创新型城市的评价方法,开展创新统计和调查,充分发挥知识产权制度的重要作用,加强对创新政策前沿和热点的跟踪等。     

Knowledge space oddity: How to increase the intensity and relevance of the technological progress of European regions

This work contributes to previous research on the relationship between specific features of a regional knowledge space and the technological progress of the region. In particular, the main element of originality of this work is to have singled out the determinants of the technological progress intensity and relevance. We acknowledge the importance of knowledge assets for new knowledge production, and we identify path-dependent processes that allow a region to become increasingly competitive in terms of innovation potential. In particular, adopting an evolutionary view of regional development, we describe the regional knowledge space through four crucial characteristics: 1) technological knowledge base, 2) technological cumulativeness, 3) technological diversification, and 4) technological relatedness. We then measure to what extent each of the knowledge space’s characteristics differently affects the technological progress intensity and relevance of the region. A longitudinal study of 269 European regions over the period 1996–2012 was organized using data from REGPAT and Eurostat databases. Results show that technological relatedness affects positively both the intensity and relevance of the technological progress of European regions and that the other components of the knowledge space show a different impact on the two features of the technological progress. Finally, implications for EU policies supporting and stimulating regional technological progress are discussed.