environment favourable to competition, innovation and technology transfer. For Western Europe, it was increasing trade and … that state industrial policy in Europe after 1945 had been always one of the most controversial policy fields and that its … enormous differences between nations and regions in Europe, even when they had to face similar challenges. The paradigm shift …

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 … several knowledge and innovation indicators, ranging from R&D expenditures, patent data, to newly released data on different …