Regional innovation policies for new path development – beyond neo-liberal and traditional systemic views

By Franz Tödtling, Michaela Trippl. Dislocation: Awkward Spatial Transitions, 2018

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT How new regional growth paths emerge and what policy concepts are most adequate for nurturing their evolution constitute recurring themes in regional innovation and development studies. New industrial paths are often portrayed as the result of market-driven processes and Schumpeterian entrepreneurial efforts. This view goes along with a neoliberal policy approach that restricts the role of public interventions to setting up a suitable regulatory frame and supporting an entrepreneurial climate. The theoretical underpinnings and policy perspectives of this approach have been challenged by the innovation system literature, which offers a systemic view on the rise of new growth paths and advocates a more proactive role of public policy. This paper investigates the role of policy models beyond these traditional ones. We contrast different variants of systemic and multi-scalar policy concepts for new regional industrial path development. Our literature-based study shows that more recent models go beyond new path development and growth per se, paying more attention to the direction of innovation and change, and to policy approaches for achieving more sustainable forms of development. We scrutinize the theoretical and empirical bases of these new policy models and discuss why they are superior to neoliberal and older systemic ones.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1790f96bd6a88492314be70c18dd1f32f89be34e

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Citations in the corpus

Public procurement, innovation and industrial policy: Rationales, roles, capabilities and implementation (2020, background): “Rather than seeking innovation that responds to societal aims or enhances public value (Tödtling and Trippl, 2018; Fitjar et al., 2019, Uyarra et al., 2019), the new industrial policy and smart specialisation literature seeks innovation purely to build future competitive advantage (Foray, 2018).”
New directions for RIS studies and policies in the face of grand societal challenges (2021, background): “This implies to lead the innovation process in certain directions in order to solve such societal problems (Foray, 2018; Tödtling & Trippl, 2018).”
Green industry development in different types of regions (2019, background): “…studies offers new opportunities for cross-fertilization between the fields of innovation studies and economic geography (see also Strambach, 2017; Tödtling & Trippl, 2018), in particular since the imperative of sustainable development has been taken up across multiple levels of government,…”
Exploring the normative turn in regional innovation policy: responsibility and the quest for public value (2019, unknown): “A normative turn in regional innovation policy discourses has equally been motivated by perceived limitations of regional innovation system approaches to address the challenges of regional economic restructuring (Tödtling & Trippl, 2018).”