Over the past decades, economic and innovation policy across Europe moved in the direction of creating regional clusters of related firms and institutions. Creating clusters through public policy is risky, complex and costly, however. Moreover, it is not necessary to rely on clusters to...

Research organizations within enterprises and universities are part of a (regional) innovation system (RIS). An important question concerns the nature of the relation between an RIS and regional economic growth. To be more specific: how to organize the transfer of information and knowledge? How...

Innovation, as a concept, was introduced by Schumpeter to denote the introduction of five kinds of possible new approaches by entrepreneurs. The concepts of entrepreneurship and innovation have long been disregarded in static mainstream economics. Due to the acceptance of complexity and...

Regional economic analysis relies heavily on the concept of knowledge spillovers to explain economic development. But this concept is too limited since it does not explain the actual transfer of knowledge. That requires looking into social networks and social capital in order to explain the flow...