Carolin Nast (p), Tom Broekel, Lars Mewes

Alessio Giustolisi

Research shows that innovation processes increasingly rely on state intervention and support. A possible explanation for this trend is that innovations are more difficult to make, and greater efforts are needed for their realization. That is, total factor productivity in R&D appears to be on the decline. Consequently, public support is demanded and utilized to a greater extent.

So far, it is not well understood what causes the shrinking productivity of R&D efforts. However, it matches well to the observation of growing technological complexity, which in turn is associated with a demand for larger R&D efforts. Put differently, growing technological complexity requires firms to invest more into R&D to maintain the same level of innovation and to compensate for this, they rely increasingly on public support. This leads to the question of why technological complexity is growing and what the role of the growing (public) investments into R&D is therein, which potentially allow companies to explore more risky but potentially more rewarding technologies, which are two features of more complex technologies.

The present paper seeks to disentangle the relationship between public support for R&D and technological complexity by empirically assessing the two complementary hypotheses: (1) Additional public support for R&D allows R&D actors to push technological complexity; (2) Increasing levels of technological complexity induce higher requirements of public research support.

The empirical study utilizes patent data of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 1980 and 2016 that are matched with information on governmental support and technological complexity. In total, we collect information on 630 technologies. A VAR-LiNGAM indicate that the government is having neither an enabling, nor a succeeding role concerning the enhancement of technological complexity. We can assume that the US government is not able to compete with the private market in terms of inventing highly complex technologies. Nevertheless, private companies do increasingly rely on government funding and research in inventing complex technologies. Potentially, the government is indeed funding and owning basic research, on which private companies later build on (visible in them citing government research).

Maximilian Kardung (p), Dusan Drabik, Justus Wesseler

European Union (EU) policymakers support the bioeconomy to promote the development of rural areas, among other goals. An essential objective is to offer more and higher value possibilities for biomass processing locally while involving primary producers. The bioeconomy is partly seen as a means to decrease the disparity between rural and non-rural areas in the context of growing inequality. One way of promoting the deployment of local bioeconomies is to implement regional strategies and measures to promote research and innovation (R&I) targeted at the bioeconomy. EU regions already must have Smart Specialization Strategies for their planned innovation measures to receive EU financial support through the Structural Funds regulations for 2014-2020. This paper aims to investigate whether research and innovation strategies and measures targeted at the bioeconomy have led to increased employment compensation in rural areas and non-rural areas. Haarich et al. (2017) 's bioeconomy R&I maturity index, which is based on an analysis of smart specialization strategies of 210 EU regions and countries, allows us to distinguish between regions with high, middle, or low R&I bioeconomy maturity. We use panel data from Eurostat's 'Regional statistics by NUTS classification' ranging from 2008 to 2019 for 261 NUTS 2 regions. Our empirical strategy consists of the Propensity Score Matching method combined with Difference-in-Differences to estimate the impact of a high bioeconomy R&I maturity index on bioeconomy employment compensation in the NUTS2 regions. Our analysis aims to empirically assess the effect of bioeconomy research and innovation strategies and measures on employment compensation in EU regions. We investigate the determinants of an EU region's high bioeconomy R&I maturity, the effect of a high bioeconomy R&I maturity index on growth in bioeconomy employment compensation, and the difference of this effect between rural and non-rural regions. The deployment of local bioeconomies might be a helpful policy instrument to ensure skilled jobs in rural regions and decrease disparities with non-rural regions. Our results might also be used for developing national and supranational bioeconomy research and innovation strategies because estimating the effect of these strategies and measures on a national or higher is unfeasible.

Alessio Giustolisi (p)

Maximilian Kardung

In light of grand societal challenges there is an increasing awareness of the need for transforma-tive innovation policies. So far, the literature on this topic has paid insufficient attention to the role of the regional policy level. Transformative innovation policy approaches have received critique for lacking sensitivity and attention to context-specific factors and for advocating rathe rather ‘place blind’ policies. Over the past few years, scholarly work has begun to give more attention to such policies on a regional scale. With their varied characteristics, regions provide different barriers and opportunities to shape sustainability transitions. As in conventional en-dogenous innovation policy strategies, external relations play a less important role here. This paper argues that local anchor points obtain a decisive function in bringing new knowledge and impulses to a region. These anchors can combine existing capabilities and regional pre-conditions with external sources to enhance green transformation. This means that policy should target wider institutional dynamics and knowledge flows to cope with barriers and sup-port the potentials in a region. This paper analyses recent diversification processes in Lower Austria by looking into the transformation process for green restructuring. Especially, it assess-es how regional knowledge anchors set up by policy can attract, mobilize and diffuse external knowledge in a region to support the development of the bioeconomy in Lower Austria. In ad-dition, it studies how wider institutional dynamics influences such processes. The paper uses a case study approach by looking into the role of two anchors and the specific mechanisms of how external knowledge is sourced, anchored, and diffused in the region to enhance green re-structuring.