Although it has frequently been argued that the quality of institutions affects the innovative potential of a territory, the link between institutions and innovation remains a black box. This paper aims to shed light on how institutions shape innovative capacity, by focusing on how regional...

What has happened in the global wine industry is extremely interesting from a catch up point of view because the latecomers in the international market have radically changed how wine is produced, sold and consumed. Until the end of the 1980s the international market for wine was without a doubt...

This paper follows the industry employment histories of all individuals at some point affiliated with the dismantling Swedish shipbuilding industry 1970-2000. We analyse the situation of the individual workers leaving shipbuilding through investigating to what extent they were employed at all,...

The origin and growth of industrial clusters have attracted the attention of scholars and policy makers since the early era of industrialisation. The seminal work by Alfred Marshall has represented the foundation for a rich strand of literature, whose late expansion and refinement were inspired...

The 1980 patent granted to Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer for their development of rDNA technology played a critical role in the establishment of the modern biotechnology industry. From the birth of this general purpose technology in the San Francisco Bay area, rDNA-related knowledge diffused...

This paper introduces indicators of regional related variety and unrelated variety to conceptually overcome the current impasse in the specialisation-diversity debate in agglomeration economics. Although various country-level studies have been published on this conceptualisation in recent years,...

We use the historical self-employment rate as an indicator of a regional culture of entrepreneurship and link this measure to economic growth in recent periods. The results indicate that German regions with a high level of entrepreneurship in the mid-1920s have higher start-up rates about 80...

Within the smart specialisation programme, the European Commission urges regional policy-makers to assess their regional innovation potential and consider investing in the areas of eco-technologies taking into account the regions’ specific strengths and weaknesses. In evolutionary economic...

One of the key benefits of cities is that they allow the exchange of knowledge and information between economic actors. This may have two effects: it may create the conditions for entirely new innovations to emerge, and it may allow firms to learn innovations from those nearby. Yet few studies...

Local economic development (LED) strategies are increasingly being recommended as an alternative or a complement to traditional development strategies. However, beyond a limited number of areas where ‘best practices’ have been identified, there has been little systematic monitoring of...