Introduction After the impact of four decades of socialism, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) were only endowed with backward technology. To achieve sustainable economic growth rates, it was necessary to foster technology transfer and modernisation (see Solow, 1956, Romer, 1990). In this sense,...

There is broad consensus among economists that regions’ competitiveness heavily relies on their ability to produce innovative goods and services (Baumol 1967, Romer 1990, Grossman and Helpman 1991, Barro and Sala-i-Martin 1997, Los and Verspagen 2006). Main drivers of innovation...