Elsevier

Research Policy

Volume 34, Issue 8, October 2005, Pages 1123-1127
Research Policy

Editorial
Regionalization of innovation policy—Introduction to the special issue

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The question

This special issue of Research Policy is devoted to the regionalization of innovation policy. Up to the present, the academic discussion about innovation policy issues has largely ignored the possibilities of decentralization. And in many countries, innovation policy is mainly operated at the national-level applying the same measures and criteria for all types of region. However, there have always been numerous examples of innovation policy measures at a sub-national level,1

Rationale for regionalization of innovation policy

There are several reasons to assume that to regionalize innovation policy may have advantages:

  • First, innovation processes are not spread evenly across space, but they are concentrated in certain areas while being more or less absent in other regions. It is, therefore, quite likely that national innovation policies have a regional impact, whether intended or not. Due to the pronounced regional dimension of innovation processes, it may be advantageous to give national policy a regional

What may ‘regionalization’ mean?

Regionalization of innovation policy can mean a variety of things. This becomes particularly clear when regarding different elements of a policy that could be regionalized in some way. In order to illuminate the different possibilities of policy regionalization, it may be helpful to distinguish between policy objectives, the level of operation, the instruments, the way of administration, allocation of decision competencies and finance (Table 1).

The objective of a policy may be the achievement

Overview on contributions to this issue

The contributions to this special issue deal with different aspects, which are important in the discussion of necessities for a regionalization of innovation policy and ways in which this can be achieved. Main topics are the role of innovation for regional development (Asheim and Coenen; Cooke; Ronde and Hussler; Audretsch and Lehmann), the variety of characteristics and problems of regional innovation systems (Asheim and Coenen; Howells; Toedtling and Trippl), as well as the instruments for

Conclusion and outlook

There can hardly be any doubt that a regionalization of innovation policy may have significant advantages over a pure central-level approach that operates with uniform instruments regardless of region-specific characteristics. Given the prevailing dominance of such a central-level approach in innovation policy, there are obviously large potentials for improvement. The topics of the contributions to this special issue reflect the current discussion about regional innovation policy quite well.

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