Benjamin Cornejo Costas (p), Andrea Morrison, Nicola Cortinovis

Miroslav Šipikal

Technological change is an iterative process that different agents of structural change can achieve. Mechanisms of technological change that act as agents are FDI, multinational corporations or migrants.
Recent studies have shown that sourcing external knowledge is essential for recombining knowledge underlying the innovation process. Migrants are an example of this. Regions benefit from the presence of migrant inventors in several ways, including entering new technological sectors and triggering technological change through knowledge creation and brokering.
In this paper, we aim to link the effect of diversity embodied in migrants as brokers of external knowledge on the production of green technologies.
Technological diversity is crucial in promoting recombination and successful invention, as it leads to the formation of new connections and more comprehensive environments for creative solutions. This diversity is brought up in patents by migrants that act as agents of structural change. But diversity is also a social capital of a given region in different forms, like tolerance to migrants or attitudes towards climate change.
Using patents covering two different periods from 1990 to 2019, we retrieved the nationality and the addresses of around 19.000 inventors residing in Europe, representing around 100.000 green patents in the EU and EFTA countries and the UK.
We expect to find a stronger effect of regions with 1-highly skilled migrants; 2- more acceptance of migrants, 3- more acknowledgement of climate change issues; and 4- the interaction between the migrants and the region's social capital on the production of green technologies.

Luis Enrique Santiago-García, Alejandro Sanchez-Zarate (p)

Benjamin Cornejo Costas

The primacy of the service sector in the global economy has modified innovation processes in functional and spatial ways. KIS are keystones in the innovation process due to their high-level employment qualification. Although the KIS location patterns have been widely studied in Latin American cities on inter and intra-urban scales, previous works have only focused on the location of establishments or total employment, and few of these have studied the level of qualification of the employment.

The main objective of this article is to analyze the intra-urban distribution of employment by level of education in KIS in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). Methodologically, KIS are classified by 'intensity' and 'type' of knowledge in their activities: analytic, synthetic, and symbolic. Employment qualification is obtained from the microdata, which provides the education level of the employed in a categorical way: basic, middle, and high education. To identify the formation of high-qualified employment clusters, the Location Quotient (LQ) and a Spatial Autocorrelation Index are implemented.

The results reinforce that KIS are based on highly qualified people compared to the total economy. Although there are differences between KIS types. The symbolic, analytical, and synthetic KIS report 30.5%, 70.6% and 75.5% of their employees are highly educated, respectively. These percentages contrast with metropolitan high-educated employment (16.6%). Spatially, the results suggest the formation of clusters of qualified employment in KIS with geographical links to industrial zones, medical research centers, and universities, configuring a polycentric spatial pattern. These results contribute to reflecting on the role of KIS in the development of knowledge-intensive cities and the existence of a spatial mismatch between the location of KIS establishments and the location of highly educated employment.

Maike Becker (p), Francesco Cappellano, Indra Da Silva Wagner, Bernd Ebersberger, Teemu Makkonen

Alejandro Sanchez-Zarate

This study investigates the link between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and regional readiness to tackle societal challenges (SCs). Particularly, we focus on the SC Bioeconomy because it is gaining prominence in regional development strategies for coping with an increasing demand for food, energy, products, and service, using renewable biological resources (EC, 2014). Ultimately, Bioeconomy can help reduce the environmental footprint and fight the climate crisis (Kuckertz et al., 2020).

HEIs have been extensively considered for their threefold mission to provide and generate knowledge, as well as to support knowledge-intensive businesses via technology transfer, affecting regional development (Youtie & Shapira, 2008). Although scholars in the regional innovation systems literature emphasise the need for generating SC-oriented knowledge (Tödtling et al., 2022), the role of HEIs to promote SC-oriented innovation represents an unexplored aspect. Also, there is a lack of knowledge on how the geographical contextuality affects the role HEIs play as critical agents to bolster the endogenous regional capacities in the field of Bioeconomy.

Therefore, we inspect the relationship between HEIs and the regional readiness to face SCs on the regional level by controlling for place-specific conditions. Specifically, we focus on Germany as there is a nationwide Bioeconomy strategy, reflecting the prominence of the topic in its innovation policy. We use data at German NUTS-3 level and proxy the readiness of regions to tackle specific SCs through the RE-SCORE (REgional Societal Challenges-Oriented REadiness) index, introduced by Cappellano et al. (2022).

As the analysis of the regional determinants for the Bioeconomy RE-SCORE could draw on multiple plausible theories, each one giving rise to a different econometric model, we employ Bayesian model averaging (BMA) to address this model uncertainty. We estimate the model structure and the model parameters simultaneously. Along with the features of the HEI system in each German region, we consider potential determinants to capture socio-economic characteristics, regional economic structures, the political environments, and agglomeration effects. Data on HEIs originate from the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER), comprising information at the institutional level on HEIs’ activities and outputs, such as students, graduates, personnel, finances, as well as their geographical location. Additionally, we use a broad spectrum of databases provided by RISIS to construct the RE-SCORE index. Figures on regional statistics come from EUROSTAT and DESTATIS.

To conclude, the study adopts an economic geography perspective to glean insights about a place-based approach and the role of HEIs to orient innovation toward SCs.

Miroslav Šipikal (p), Klaudia Glittová

Maike Becker

Science and technology parks represent one of the tools that are used to support the cooperation of universities and companies and thereby improve the overall research and innovation activity in the regions. Their advantage is that they can carry out commercial innovation activities more easily than a university and at the same time establish cooperation with businesses more effectively. However, such institutions did not exist in the post-communist countries of Central Europe. In order to catch up with the innovative performance of the more advanced countries of Western Europe, governments have invested significant financial resources to build these institutions. Our research was focused precisely on the ways in which the three selected countries Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia supported the creation and functioning of these institutions. The research was carried out in the form of interviews with relevant stakeholders and the study of documents and outputs of these institutions. It turned out that the government support had a fundamental impact on the initial functioning of these science and technology parks, while we can observe a significant country effect of support. At the same time, the institutional anchoring of the parks, the selection of appropriate focus and activities and their connection to the regional innovation system proved to be key factors for the successful functioning of these parks