Regional Innovation Systems: an Annotated Bibliography

Innovation, the ability to create, diffuse, and adopt new ideas and to transform them into new profitable products, processes, and services has been increasingly seen as an essential, if not the primary, driving force behind the enhancement of productivity, competitiveness, and economic welfare. While people conventionally understood the mechanism of generating innovation as a straightforward linear process from basic research to technology transfer and completed by industrial commercialization, researchers have begun to challenge this rationale with a complex, systemic model for innovation, viz. the theory of the systems of innovation where the orchestrated efforts and interactions among governments, universities and industries, among others, is taken as the source of sustainable innovation. This annotated bibliography grew out of a project to quantify the effects of regional innovation systems on economic development entitled ``Performance Measurement and Asset Mapping of Regional Innovation Systems in the United States". The literature contained here represents a spectrum of ideas on both national and regional innovation systems. While there has been an explosion of literature on innovation in the past few years, the WVU Regional Research Institute (RRI) has attempted to narrow the literature down to key representative examples and categorize it to help future researchers become familiar with the topics involved. The categories include: definitions of innovation and regional innovation systems, methodologies for measuring innovation performance, and empirical applications of these methodologies at different levels and across different regions. When available, RRI has included the abstract of the article. When an abstract was not available, RRI has summarized the article's contents. Additional comments from the authors may follow as `Notes' to direct the readers toward a better exploitation of selected literatures.