Alberto Díaz Dapena (p), Tania Fernández-García, Elena Lasarte Navamuel, Fernando Rubiera Morollón, Lorena García-Alonso

Atilla Havas

One of the main sources of regional economic growth and productivity is the investment in innovation and development across the chain of production. This component is considered a key element of economic activity, specially in the long run. Given enough time, these investments can easily create new opportunities for firms in terms of higher profitability in existing markets and/or access to new markets, boosting production and rent at a macroeconomic level.
Despite the importance of this component in the theoretical literature, there are important difficulties to accurately measure it given that most of the firms tend to locate their headquarters in the capital of countries. This bias can easily mislead regional governments about the impact of their policies to boost this indicator, changing their decisions, or the importance of this variable to increase economic activity in a region.
We propose a methodology based on Gutierrez-Portilla, et al (2019), where the authors measured the importance of headquarters effect on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Through this paper we estimate regional headquarters effect in innovation from 1990 through a panel specification with spatial effects using European data provided by Eurostat. We also evaluate what regions tend to be more affected by this type of problem in their indicators.

Diana Gutiérrez Posada (p), Tania Fernández García, André Carrascal Incera, Fernando Rubiera Morollón

Alberto Díaz Dapena

See extended abstract

Atilla Havas (p), György Molnár

Diana Gutiérrez Posada

Having considered numerous definitions and models of social innovation (SI), first we propose a new, nominal definition and then develop a new model of SI, inspired by the multi-channel interactive learning model of business innovations. As opposed to the linear models of innovation, this model does not identify ‘stages’ of business innovation. Rather, it stresses that innovation is an interactive process, in which collaboration among various partners are crucial, as they possess different types of knowledge, all indispensable for successful innovation activities. Following this logic, we identify the major actors in an SI process, their activities, interactions, modes of (co-)producing, disseminating, and utilising knowledge. We also consider the micro and macro environment of a given SI. We illustrate the analytical relevance of the proposed model by considering three real-life cases. The model can assist SI policy-makers, policy analysts, as well as practitioners when devising, implementing or assessing SI.