Regional and national policy makers have invested heavily in the cluster concept as a means of generating value for regions, particularly through the opportunities it may present for small regional enterprises as vehicles for growth and job creation. Economic theorists such as Porter, have shaped many of policies being adopted, from a macro-economic perspective, yet the process by which actors ...

Public procurement can be a major source of innovation. The potential benefits of public procurement might be fully exploited through the acquisition not only of appliances which are already available in the market, but also of new appliances which are tailored to the specific needs of the local community and might be exported as well to the international markets. In this way, public procuremen...

The relationship between knowledge investments, innovation and competitiveness is an important topic in both academic research and economic policy and has been studied extensively over the past decades. Nowadays, investments in private and public R&D are believed to make up the heart of a modern knowledge economy. The present paper adopts an evolutionary economics perspective and investigates w...

In recent years regional policy has become more and more concerned with the improvement of the innovation capacity and performance of firms. Many regional development strategies have as key elements the support of their regional innovation systems and innovative clusters of firms. It has been recognized that increasing the technological level, the value added and the competitiveness of a region...

Throughout Western Europe, metropolitan governance is back on the agenda: since the early 1990s, new forms of city-suburban cooperation, regional coordination , region-wide spatial planning and metropolitan institutional reform have been promoted in major city-regions. In contrast to the forms of metropolitan gov-ernance that prevailed during the Fordist-Keynesian period, which emphasized admin...