Over the last few years, the world economy has gone through a severe period of economic downturn, the worst since the end of WWII. Although the crisis has been widely covered on the media, less common knowledge is the fact that the crisis has engendered responses in the economic systems, in the...

In this paper, we aim at re-assessing the undisputed positive relationship between innovation and economic growth by questioning the view that R&D (and formal knowledge in general) equates innovation and innovation equates regional growth. We rather propose that these linkages are strongly...

Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent...