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Innovation policies for regional structural change: Combining actor-based and system-based strategies

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  • Arne Isaksen
  • Franz Tödtling
  • Michaela Trippl

Abstract

There seems to be a widespread consensus in academic and policy circles that the promotion of current economic strongholds and specialisations is no longer sufficient in order to ensure the long-term competitiveness of regions. New policy concepts such as smart specialisation emphasize the need to break with past practices and design and implement innovation strategies that boost regional structural change, i.e. policies that support regional economies to renew their industrial base by diversifying into new but related economic fields or creating entirely new sectors. This new strategic orientation for regional innovation policies has essentially been informed by evolutionary economic geography, which has offered novel insights into how regional economies transform over time and how new growth paths come into being. Applying a regional innovation system (RIS) perspective, recent work has enhanced our understanding of how such processes of regional economic change vary across different types of regions. RIS differ enormously in their capacity to develop new growth paths due to pronounced differences in endogenous potentials and varying abilities to attract and absorb exogenous sources for new path development. The policy implications following from these recent findings on the uneven geography of new path development have hardly been thoroughly discussed so far. General claims such as the need to avoid "one size fits all" strategies and develop place-based policies for regional industrial change remain vague and provide little guidance in this regard. The aim of this paper is to identify opportunities and limitations of regional innovation policies to promote new path development in different types of RIS. We distinguish between (1) organisationally thick and diversified RIS, (2) organisationally thick and specialized RIS and (3) thin RIS. Regarding path development, a distinction is drawn between the extenstion, modernization, importation, branching and cr
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  • Arne Isaksen & Franz Tödtling & Michaela Trippl, 2016. "Innovation policies for regional structural change: Combining actor-based and system-based strategies," SRE-Disc sre-disc-2016_05, Institute for Multilevel Governance and Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2016_05
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    Cited by:

    1. Grillitsch, Markus, 2018. "Place-based entrepreneurship and innovation policy for industrial diversification," Papers in Innovation Studies 2018/3, Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research.
    2. Grillitsch, Markus & Trippl, Michaela, 2016. "Innovation Policies and New Regional Growth Paths: A place-based system failure framework," Papers in Innovation Studies 2016/26, Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research.
    3. Rüdiger Wink & Laura Kirchner & Florian Koch & Daniel Speda, 2017. "Agency and forms of path development along transformation processes in German cities," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 10(3), pages 471-490.
    4. Markus Grillitsch & Bjørn Asheim & Michaela Trippl, 2018. "Unrelated knowledge combinations: the unexplored potential for regional industrial path development," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 11(2), pages 257-274.
    5. Simón Sánchez‐Moral & Mário Vale & Alfonso Arellano, 2022. "Skill‐Relatedness and Regional Economic Development in Spain during the International Crisis and the Post‐Crisis Period," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 101(3), pages 573-602, June.

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