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...

This paper presents conceptual and empirical reasons for moving from a thematically-regionally neutral innovation policy to a thematically and regionally focused innovation policy, in line with the smart specialization approach of the new cohesion policy framework. The paper starts by claiming...

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...

This paper investigates over the way in which regions innovate. The conceptual framework departs from the simple idea that scientific activities equates knowledge, assuming that the presence of local knowledge produced by research centers, universities and firms was a necessary and sufficient...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the endogenous factors allowing regions to compete successfully in a globalized economy. These factors are expected to vary across different groups of regions, due to their different specialization and different endowment of structural connections with the...