Anna Golejewska (p)

It is taken as axiomatic that innovative activity has been the single, most important component of long-term economic growth. There is extensive evidence that knowledge and innovation are concentrated in selected regions, sub-regions or cities. The central actor for the effectuation of innovation and technological change is an enterprise. Industrial competition is increasingly harsh and companies must continuously bring innovative products and services to the global market. Region can be regarded as innovation incubator which provides appropriate conditions for setting up and development of innovative companies as well as pro-innovation behavior among other important entities of that territory.
The aim of the paper is to examine disproportions in innovativeness of enterprises in 72 Polish NUTS3 sub-regions in 2010-2014.
The analysis is based on unpublished regional data of Polish Central Statistical Office covering following variables: internal expenditure on research and development, share of enterprises which have incurred outlays for the innovative activities, share of enterprises implementing process or product innovations, share of companies collaborating in the field of innovation and share of new or modernized products in total production sold in industrial companies. It includes industrial enterprises employing more than 49 people. The data is extracted from innovation statements in industry (PNT-02). Research methods applied in the paper are: methods of multidimensional comparative analysis, the principal component analysis and input-output analysis.
The results show that there have been substantial differences among Polish sub-regions as regards innovativeness of enterprises. This applies to both input and output indicators. The low level of cooperation does not foster innovation and confirm that there is still a mutual distrust between companies in Poland as regards innovation activity. Innovation outputs of enterprises are also far from satisfactory.

Ioannis Kaplanis (p), Theano Maria Tagaraki

There has been extensive literature that associates patent activity with strong innovative performance, technological diffusion and consequently growth. The differential patterns of innovative performance across regions warrant for a thorough analysis at the spatial level, that takes into account the regional industrial structure and the local institutions. Such regional traits might matter not only for periods of booms in order to utilize local talent and boost performance, but also in periods of bust in order to curtail recessionary pressures.
The case of Greece might be insightful, as during the recent period of acute crisis (2009-2015), that followed decades of robust growth, there have been important differences in the regional performance that need to be further explored. It is imperative to conduct such study, since the country’s regional innovative performance has been scarcely investigated, probably due to data availability limitations.
In this paper, we use for the first time newly collected and processed data from the Greek Patent Office (Hellenic Industrial Property Organization- OBI), in order to frame and analyse the industrial profile, innovative performance and economic growth for each of the thirteen geographical regions of Greece for the time period of 1988-2016.
In our effort to determine innovative performance we use various measures of patent quantity and quality, like the radicalness indicator and the patent score. Different models of regional knowledge production functions are used to shed light with appropriate econometric techniques on the relationship of regional innovation and regional characteristics, that have been proposed in the literature such as, institutional conditions, human capital, social factors, corporate and market characteristics. Interesting results are drawn from our study both for the regional traits that drive innovative performance, but also on how their impact might differ in periods of bust, compared to the boom ones.

Philipp Marek (p), Mirko Titze

This paper explores the impact of proximity measures on two indicators capturing networks of knowledge exchange, namely patent applications and granted research and development (R&D) collaboration projects. Therefore, we analyze impact of proximity on each measurement for innovation collaborations. The analysis also captures the interdependence between proximity measures as well as the relatedness between both knowledge exchange indicators.
In our analysis, we apply a count model estimating the number of projects in which partner from two regions are involved; on the one hand for German NUTS-3 regions, and on the other hand for the more aggregated concept of German Raumordnungsregionen. Given the structure of the dataset, we apply a longitudinal spatial interaction model. In order to acount for spatial autocorrelation, we include eigenvector spatial filters (see e.g. Griffith and Chun, 2014).
In-line with previous findings (see e.g. Scherngell and Lata, 2013, or Marek et al, 2017), the results of the analysis show that geographical but also other forms of proximity (technological, organizational and institutional) have a significant influence on the emergence of research collaborations. These results also hold for patent collaborations. Furthermore, the results suggest interdependences between proximity measures. When these interdependencies are omitted, the estimation results provide overestimated coefficients for the isolated proximity measures.
Nevertheless, geographic “location” plays a crucial role. Concerning geographical and cognitive distance, the estimates and descriptive statistics indicate that nearby collaborations as well as collaborations between technological clusters represent a very high share within the German R&D support scheme. Since knowledge exchange is crucial for the innovative success of firms, regions and projects, this finding suggests that German R&D grants amplify the concentration of innovative activities. Because innovation is considered as a key factor for the economic performance of regions, the innovation subsidy scheme potentially contributes to the regional concentration of economic activities in Germany. Therefore, the findings suggest that it makes no sense to establish publicly funded research organizations in regions that do not possess appropriate capacities to absorb knowledge (e.g., actors working in the same technological field). Hence, the reduction of regional disparities cannot be aim of this specific kind of policy – it should be (if indeed necessary) subject of other support schemes.