Rikard Eriksson , Marcin Rataj (p)

Natalia Zaitsev

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Susanne Frick, Andres Rodriguez-Pose (p)

Michael Wyrwich

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Michael Wyrwich (p), Michael Fritsch

Marcin Rataj

Large cities may have many advantages commonly known as positive agglomeration economies. Recent literature has particularly stressed the role of large cities for creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation (Florida, Adler & Mellander 2017; Glaeser 2011). It seems to be a widespread conviction that large cities are ‘innovation machines’ and that entrepreneurship and innovation requires cities (Florida, Adler & Mellander 2017).
The case of Germany can be regarded as a counterexample to this popular belief. We analyze the spatial distribution of R&D activity and entrepreneurship across German regions with a particular focus on large cities, smaller cities and relatively remote rural regions. Our analysis shows that although some larger cities in Germany are innovation centers, there are also many smaller cities and particularly some remote rural areas that are home of world market leaders and generate many economically successful innovations.
We discuss several reasons for this German ‘anomaly’. In particular, we discuss historical roots of regional entrepreneurship and innovation activities that have produced certain regional cultures. We argue that the pronounced Federal tradition of Germany may have shaped regional structures today. There are, however, quite numerous cases suggesting that there must be more than the political history that put the popular belief that rural areas are unsuited for successful innovation and entrepreneurship into question.

Natalia Zaitsev (p), Shuki Dror

Andres Rodriguez-Pose

The firm's choice of a business development strategy has to take into account the requirements of regional society. The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concept provides a socially oriented framework for choosing a business development strategy for improving the quality of people's lives in the region.
To enrich the practice of CSR initiatives, we accept the well - known CSR standards, select from them relevant outcomes and indicators, and use them for our study’s main real-world purpose – development of a quantitative approach designed to establish the most important business strategies vis-à-vis CSR initiatives contributing to the effective firm's and region's development.
We use the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methodology, coupled with the Mean Square Error (MSE) criterion, to identify a subset of vital CSR indicators necessary to achieve the best CSR outcomes for all types of regional businesses at all stages of their development.
For a specific business case (data were collected from a manufacturing plant in the chemical engineering and energy industry), an adapted House of Quality (HOQ) matrix was created using combined input from various senior and line managers.
The studied plant performs very complicated chemical engineering operations, its main characteristics are: it is one of the bigger employers in the region, its technological processes provide many kinds of externalities, and therefore, the plant operates under conditions of strict environmental regulation, and has a significant role in the regional development.
A House of Corporate Social Responsibility (HoCSR) matrix summarizes the desired improvements in the CSR results and connects them to the relevant reportable CSR indicators.
Naturally, almost all vital indicators for improvement relate to environmental aspects of this plant’s business performance. The group of indicators from the environment category was strengthened by the social aspect of business responsibility which includes health, human development and safety aspects at the workplace.
We found that the QFD based approach presents an effective way for establishing the most important business strategies concerning CSR initiatives, and for strengthening the relationships between firm's and region's development policies by taking a more objective look at firm's impact on people and communities in the region.