Yifat Turbiner (p), Nurit Zaidman , Dafna Schwartz

In recent years the popularity of informal entrepreneurial events such as hackathons, meetups and unconferences persists and grows beyond any specific industry, sector or geographical area. While it is generally acknowledged that informal entrepreneurial events have a significant role in structuring and shaping the innovation ecosystem, only limited research has focused on such new methods capable of enhancing knowledge exposition and people interaction outside the firm boundaries. Notably, scant research has been devoted to assessing HOW, and in WHAT WAYS, these events impact innovation ecosystems.

The study addresses this research lacuna by showing the impact of informal entrepreneurial events on their participants and subsequently the entire innovation ecosystem. We do so by systematically exploring and comparing the impact of two distinctive and predominant informal entrepreneurial events, on the innovation ecosystem: (i) unconferences, which represent an unstructured and open-format events; and (ii) hackathons that represent a relatively structured, competitive and problem-focused events. Both provide a platform for accomplishing two main processes recognized as affecting the innovation process and innovation ecosystems ––knowledge sharing and connectivity between diverse crowds.

The study uses a mixed methods research design. It starts with exploratory research to open a window into the topic of informal entrepreneurial events as enablers of innovation capabilities enhancement. The study then continues with a quantitative research to test hypotheses regarding the mechanism of informal entrepreneurial events and the apparent added value generated by such events. Ultimately, a conceptual model demonstrating the impact of informal entrepreneurial events will be presented.

This study makes several potential contributions: (i) it illuminates the particular contribution of informal entrepreneurial events to the connectivity and sustainability of innovation ecosystems, beyond specific industrial, sectorial and institutional boundaries; (ii) it redirects research attention to a category of significant actors, namely the individuals who constitute the micro foundations of the innovation ecosystem; and (iii) beyond illuminating several theoretical aspects, this analysis is of value to organizations and institutions that seek to influence the innovation competencies of their employees and to policy makers who wish to influence the field of innovation generally.

Simona Curpan (p)

The regional development policy is a policy of solidarity, meaning a policy for people, its purpose being to create working places, to increase the competitiveness level and the potential for innovation.
In Bucharest-Ilfov region from Romania, continuing the networking process within the sustainable development context with new members and new communication activities is important because all the actors of regional policy must cooperate to develop the network communication in order to attract more European Union funds to finances smart sustainable projects
The paper aims to analyze how the regional policy was implemented in Bucharest-Ilfov region, to follow REGIO–Regional Operational Program indicators regarding the urban regeneration.
The methodology consists in the comparative analysis of the cohesion programs, especially REGIO with concrete examples of REGIO projects.
In this paper, I consider important the partnerships of the local authorities and other actors from development and innovation policy for the efficiency of EU funds as one of the challenges for urban regeneration and innovation in Bucharest-Ilfov region.

Andrea Ascani, Luca Bettarelli, Laura Resmini (p), Pierre-Alexandre Balland

A large consensus exists nowadays on the idea that successful innovative processes are geographically bounded within regions (Storper, 1997; Cooke et al., 1998; Balland and Rigby, 2017), where persistent and dense interactions between co-located organisations stimulate economic specialization, learning and the development of new competences (Boschma and Frenken, 2007). Nevertheless, the ability of regions to capture, understand, absorb and re-use external knowledge is also regarded as a fundamental element to sustain and refine the local profile of specialisation and competitiveness (Bathelt et al., 2004). In fact, trans-local networks can provide specific regions with diverse and related information sources and opportunities to develop novel trajectories of specialisation by combining internal and external knowledge resources (Owen-Smith and Powell, 2004; Boschma and Iammarino, 2009). Therefore, these extra-regional linkages are believed to play a crucial role in upgrading local competences, contributing to avoiding industrial and technological stagnation and lock-in, that may result from a rigidly inward-looking regional system of local interactions. The present article combines the insight of these streams of work by assessing and comparing the roles of regional external networks and internal specialisation in fostering local innovation. To this aim, we make use of data on Italian regions over the period 2007-2012 and we define regional external networks based on all the foreign subsidiaries of local multinational enterprises identifiable as global ultimate owners. Furthermore, we measure local innovation with patents in a variety of technological classes. Our main results suggest that both the internal specialisation and the outward networks of Italian regional economies can generate indigenous innovation, but the role of the network varies substantially according to its internal specialisation, its geographical spread and the specific location of the foreign subsidiaries. Our results, then, support a view of the regional innovation as an interactive process whereby valuable knowledge resources are not only generated within the reach of the local economy, but they are also integrated with external inputs. Therefore, one fundamental policy implications is that regional openness and the support of the internationalisation of local companies by means of outward foreign investment can be a catalyst of regional success. This contrasts with recent anti-globalisation views according to which the increase in the foreign operations of national companies impoverishes the local economy.

Nico Pintar (p), Thomas Scherngell

Knowledge creation is widely considered as the central driver for innovation, and accordingly, for creating competitive advantage. However, most measurement approaches have so far mainly focused on the quantitative dimension of knowledge creation, neglecting that not all knowledge has the same value (Balland and Rigby, 2017). The notion of knowledge complexity has come into use in this context just recently as an attempt to measure the quality of knowledge in terms of its uniqueness and its replicability. Currently, there is a debate about the most appropriate approach to measure technological and (regional) knowledge complexity (Broekel, 2017). Central underlying assumptions differ insofar as that in the first approach the apparent combinatorial difficulty of knowledge pieces of a technology should proxy the complexity of technologies (Fleming and Sorenson, 2001). Another assumes that the structural complexity of combinatorial networks of technologies should signal technological complexity (Broekel, 2017) and a third compares the production of knowledge to (global) trade networks where suppliers that manage to export sophisticated products are assumed to have certain technological capabilities and thus a complex economy (Hidalgo and Hausmann, 2009; Balland and Rigby, 2017).
The focus of this study is on the comparison of these differing conceptual and empirical measurements of knowledge complexity on the regional level of analysis, and on the spatial distribution of complex knowledge created in Europe. We proxy the production of complex knowledge with a regional knowledge complexity index (KCI) that is based on regional patent data which is adjusted with citations received by subsequent patent applications. This is done because it is recognised that the use of raw patent counts as measures of innovative output can be problematic because patents’ value and importance vary extremely (see e.g. Trajtenberg, 1990). The dataset covers patent applications of inventors located in European metropolitan regions from current EU and EFTA member countries in the most recent five-year period with reliable data (2005-2009). The initial results are promising as the regional KCI unveils knowledge creation patterns not observed by conventional measures. Not only that complex knowledge is unevenly distributed in geographical space, the results show that regions specialising in complex knowledge are not necessarily those with the highest overall patenting intensity.