Place-Based Innovation Ecosystems. A Case-Study Comparative Analysis

Abstract

This case-study comparative analysis focuses on five different Place-based Innovation Ecosystems in four countries of the European Union (namely Espoo in Finland, Barcelona in Spain, Gothenburg in Sweden and Ljubljana in Slovenia) and one in the United States of America (Boston) and seeks to generate scientific evidence for the future development of the European Union policies related to innovation in the context of regional and urban innovation ecosystems. All five selected and presented Place-based Innovation Ecosystems have been individually synthesised, analysed and compared based on common dimensions of analysis. These results allowed - as a first theoretical approximation to a specific typology - to define five different models of Place-based Innovation Ecosystems, with the potential to serve as an indicative reference for the development of other EU (and non-EU) cases. In conclusion, this study evidences a high complexity of innovation ecosystems with different levels of implementation of the Quadruple Helix Model and different kind of interrelations with Smart Specialisation Strategies and their inherent Entrepreneurial Discovery Processes. Orchestrators and main key-players play an essential role in the governance of the innovation ecosystems, performing a leadership role concerning local, regional, national and international innovation-related policy agendas. This leadership, talent attraction and retaining, the presence of research and innovation infrastructure, complementary system stakeholders and internationalisation were detected as core elements for successful local and regional innovation ecosystems.