Anna Dokukina (p), Dmitry Averchenko

Globalization, innovation economy and knowledge oriented business require effective approaches to data storage and retrieval. Technological development which is initially aimed at industrial progress can pose a serious problem related to data security, and potentially leads to catastrophic consequences. Especially this concerns strategically important organizations such as nuclear facilities.
The paper describes some points of the research project devoted to the analysis and implementation of cybersecurity system management. In particular, the topic is connected with the framework of principles that can be applied by Russian nuclear enterprises. Parameters of data protection framework implemented by the nuclear power station are critically examined.
The theoretical background of the research includes papers issued by United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), particularly, review of national data security programs of different countries, and academic debates of High Level Group of Scientific Advisors, EU. Summary of researches conducted by worldwide famous data protection companies such as “Kaspersky”, “Intel” and “Symantec” are considered. Publications of such authors as R. Anderson, K. Geer, A. Gene, R. Ross et al. are carefully studied. Practical issues are explored on the basis of materials presented by Federal Service of Technical and Expert Control (FSTEC) and the company’s unique inside information.
Outcomes are focused on the introduction of clear system of criteria which can be applied in cybersecurity strategic management. Methods of research are concerned with literature review, document analysis, deductive approach to modern economic and business development, case studies. The lack of accessible best practices, business information confidentiality, differences in understanding of IT fraud, and changeable and complicated characteristics of cybersecurity sphere itself should be outlined as main limitations of this research. However, the hypothesis – safety condition of nuclear enterprises in Russia is impossible without modern policy of cybersecurity – is proved.

Océane Bertrand, Alice Dumont (p), Christophe Ernaelsteen, Malory Rennoir

Originally conceived as a process for analyzing economic performances between competing companies, the benchmarking is increasingly used with reference to regions. An explanation of this emergence can be found in the increased competition between territorial entities following globalization, and in growing socio-economic disparities between regions being within the same country or not.

An important issue in regional benchmarking consists of choosing a relevant group of regions to compare with the region of interest. Generally, building a group of regions relies on some geographic criterion (e.g. including the nearest regions), or a group of comparable regions is composed according to a distance index calculated on a set of variables. However, recent contributions have highlighted a potential selection problem in these studies. Indeed, within the set of variables, performance variables, which will be analyzed in the benchmarking, are sometimes used in the distance index. To overcome this conceptual problem, a recent contribution of the Joint Research Centre (2014) proposes to establish the reference group of regions with reference to a set of structural variables. However, questions remain: how to aggregate regional disparities into the distance index? How to weight the structural variables? This contribution aims to (1) summarize and discuss the quantitative methods used in the literature, and (2) to study the sensitivity of the group of comparable regions to these different methods. Lessons are drawn to serve the conduct of an improved regional benchmarking.

Renato Garcia (p), Emerson Gomes dos Santos, Veneziano Araujo, Suelene Mascarini, Ariana Costa

The role of geographical proximity in fostering innovation is widely recognized, and local flows of information and knowledge sharing play a very important role in interactive learning (Glaeser et al. 1992; Gertler 2003; Storper & Venables 2004). However, geographical proximity should not be consider a sufficient condition to foster interactive learning because, by itself, it cannot generate complementarities and synergies that can stimulate interaction among local actors (Gilly & Torre 2000; Boschma 2005; Broekel 2015). Based on this assumption, different dimensions of non-spatial proximity have been put forward, since they can complement, or substitute, geographical proximity (Boschma 2005; Knoben & Oerlemans 2006). If geographical proximity can be assumed to facilitate interactive learning and knowledge sharing, other dimensions of non-spatial proximity are also important in strengthening the ways in which actors collaborate and learn.
Based on this debate, this paper aims to analyse how spatial and non-spatial dimensions of proximity drives collaboration between university and industry. To do that, we perform an empirical analysis based on data of the university-industry collaboration in Brazilian regions. We use data from 2010 of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology (RAPINI et al., 2009, SUZIGAN et al., 2009, GARCIA et al., 2011).
Main results show that both geographic and cognitive distance were negative and significant, which shows that the more distant the firm is, the less it collaborate with university. Regarding the absorption capacity, firms with greater capacity are able to collaborate with more geographically distant universities. Another result of the empirical analysis show that the smaller gap in the patent density the more the interest of the company to interact with research groups in a given region. Therefore, the contributions with this study are highlight similarities in a specific database for development country to guide future studies in this topic