Yihan Wang (p), Sébastien Bourdin

Renato Garcia

In the regional innovation ecosystem, the territorial governance underlines the organization and coordination mechanisms among the key stakeholders. Serving as the basic territorial and functional component a region’s innovation ecosystem, the clusters aggregate the collaboration among key stakeholders and contributes to the global competitiveness of local industries.
In this study, we analyze the territorial governance mechanisms of different types of innovation clusters. Specifically, we compare the geographical, organizational and institutional distinctions of cluster agglomerations based on geographical proximity, and cluster networks based on organized proximity. We compare the locations of cluster members, the organizational logic, and the roles of institutional agencies in both types of clusters. On this ground, we further discuss the policy implications on how the territorial governance in cluster formation contributes to the regional innovation competitiveness.
To fulfil these objectives, we conduct comparative case studies on Cité Biotech Laval and Polepharma, two large innovation clusters of pharmaceutical industry in Canada and France respectively. Comparing their different geographical, organizational, and institutional characteristics, we argue that, although both types of clusters have a strong tendency of spatial agglomeration of local cluster members, cluster networks are more effective in establishing pipelines outside the cluster territory. In terms of organizational logic, the members of industrial clusters share higher degree of institutional similarity, whereas the members of cluster networks share higher degree of social adherence. In both networks, governmental authorities play the key role in launching innovation initiatives, providing public funding and implement innovation policies. Nonetheless, mediating government policy-making and citizen participation in the territorial governance, the innovation intermediaries play varied roles in both clusters. In the industrial clusters, the intermediaries mostly play the indirect roles of orchestrator that maintain the network connectivity and facilitator of knowledge diffusion. In the cluster networks, in addition to these two roles, the intermediaries also directly intervene in local innovation activities as the brokers that organize key events, innovators that initiate innovation projects and new ventures, and mediators that intervene the corporate decision-making of cluster members.
In this study, we integrate the geographical, organizational, and institutional features of territorial governance in the formation of clusters. Moreover, by comparing different configurations of industrial clusters and cluster networks, we also highlight the determinants of local innovation ecosystem configurations and global innovation network connectivity in regional territorial governance. Furthermore, we address the different roles of innovation intermediaries in both clusters, and how they affect regional innovation competitiveness.

Suelene Mascarini (p), Renato Garcia, Francesco Quatrado

Yihan Wang

Despite the global consensus that regions build on existing foundation capabilities to develop new activities or reinforce existing activities and a large body of literature argues that this process requires regions to identify and create links with different regions that provide new knowledge, the role played by regional links in technological branching or specialization has been widely neglected in the literature, especially in developing countries. Analysing 127 classes of technologies across 135 Brazilian mesoregions during the period 1997-2019, this work attempts to address this research gap. We find strong evidence that both intra- and interregional linkages impede new entry of technological specialization and technological branching. In addition, the relation between interregional linkages and new specialization and diversification is moderated by the technological capacity of regions. New technology has a higher probability of being introduced to a region when this region is connected to other regions that offer different technological capabilities in a manner that is independent of the technological capacity of the region. In addition, linkages that are outside the region's technological portfolio have no impact on branching, while linkages that are inside the technological portfolio of the region are likely to promote branching. In summary, interlinkages per se tend to impede the entry of new technologies or branching, but interlinkages with specialized partners promote them.

Jana Vlckova (p), Ondrej Sankot (p), Viktor Kveton

Suelene Mascarini

In the recent 20 years, multinational companies have increasingly expanded and opened research divisions/centers in former command economies in Central Europe. This contributes to higher rates of patent offshoring in these regions (Kadlec et al 2022), as knowledge production is highly concentrated under the control of foreign companies. Therefore, this contribution reveals whether capabilities from the R&D centers of MNEs spill over to domestic entities in different regional ecosystems. We focus on Czechia at both the national and regional levels and also distinguish between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. Furthermore, we also estimate whether MNEs contribute to technological diversification to more complex technologies. We match patent (REGPAT) and firm-level (Orbis) data and assign each patent to a specific firm establishment or institution. This enables us to map the knowledge spillovers from both - the inventions assigned to Czech establishments as well as those offshored to establishments abroad.

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

Jana Vlckova

There is a strong recognition that inward FDI spillovers can be an important channel for the introduction of new technological knowledge in host regions, with positive effects on regional innovation. In this paper, we aim to examine the role of local absorptive capacity in moderating the relation between inward FDI spillovers and regional innovation. Previous studies increasingly recognize that host region absorptive capacity matters for knowledge spillovers and innovation, but there is few empirical evidence on how local absorptive capacity can be a moderating factor for the relation between inward FDI and regional innovation. We use data on investments of multinational companies (MNCs) in Brazilian regions in the period of 2003-2014 and relate them to regional innovative performance measured by patents. Our results show that the greater the local absorptive capacity, expressed by the local firms’ capabilities, local academic efforts, and regional industrial structure, the greater the benefits of inward FDI spillovers on regional innovation.