Public procurement has been at the centre of recent discussions on innovation policy on both European and national levels (e.g., Aho-Report, Barcelona Strategy). It has a large potential to stimulate innovation since it accounts for 16% of combined EU-15 GDP. We embed public procurement for...

Previous literature provided evidence on financing constraints for investment in R&D activities due to capital market imperfections and special features of R&D investments. Moreover, it has been shown that a shift in capital structure towards more debt, results in a reduction of R&D investments....

We investigate regional differences in the level and the development of regional new business formation activity. There is a pronounced variance of start-up rates across the regions. The level of regional new firm formation is rather path-dependent so that changes are relatively small. The main...

The BioRegio contest and the BioProfile contest initiated by the German Federal Government have drawn much international attention as prototypes of a new kind of technology policy aiming at the exploitation of regional innovation and growth potential through clustering. There is, however, little...

This paper discusses the role of so-called national champions within the context of the EU's ambitious goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic region in the world by 2010. We find football to be a useful analogy in our discussion of national champions. There are...

This study analyzes the relationship between the specialization of a region in certain industries and the efficiency of the region in generating new knowledge. The efficiency measure is constructed by relating regional R&D input and output. An inversely u-shaped relationship is found between...