Universities and public research organisations play a vital role not only in the generation of new technological knowledge, but also in its diffusion. We analyse four East German local networks of innovators which differ in structure and innovative performance and investigate the characteristic...

We analyze the development of the German knowledge base measured by co-classifications of patents by German inventors and relate this technological development to changes in the structure of the underlying inventor networks. Our central hypothesis states that technologies which become more...

We compare two leading regional innovation systems (RIS) in East Germany with two RIS in West Germany of about the same size and internal settlement structure. Our analyses show that differences in the performance between the regions cannot easily be related to the structural properties of the...