The three great issues confronting Europe - economic, environmental and political

Europe is confronted by an intimidating triple challenge – economic stagnation, climate change, and a governance crisis. This paper demonstrates how the three challenges are closely inter-related, and discusses how they can be dealt with more effectively in order to arrive at a more economically secure, environmentally sustainable and well governed Europe. In particular, a return to classic economic growth cannot come at the expense of greater risk of irreversible climate change. Instead, what is required is a fundamental transformation of the economy to a new ‘green’ trajectory based on rapidly diminishing emission of greenhouse gases. Following this path would mean turning Europe into a veritable laboratory for sustainable growth, environmentally as well as socially

Strategic Alliances: Identifying Recent Emerging Sub-Fields of Research

Research in both journals and books on strategic alliances has increased rapidly since the 1990s. Numerous related topics have been explored, such as globalisation, governance structure, learning capability, and alliance stability. The founding fathers of this literature were analysed by Ling and Chen (2012) in their bibliometric survey, which covered more than 1500 publications and 82,614 citations. Dyer and Singh (1998), Gulati (1995; 1998), Hamel (1991), Kogut (1988), Dyer (1997), Doz and Hamel (1998), and Hamel, Doz and Prahalad (1989) emerged as the most cited authors. By using the bibliometric technique, it is possible to create a map of science in a specific field or discipline. In the scientific literature, mapping of science can facilitate an understanding of the contemporaneous state of knowledge as the first requirement for a good history of science, facilitating the understanding of conceptual relations. While the analyses of citations and co-citations refer to influential articles of the past, they do not represent the core subfield of contemporary research that is, indeed, the main aim of the bibliographic coupling analysis used in this chapter

Innovation Policies and New Regional Growth Paths: A place-based system failure framework

Regional economies are increasingly facing the challenge to renew their economic structures and generate innovations that break existing development paths. This calls for new innovation policy approaches that are well equipped to foster the modernisation of existing industries and nurture the development of new ones. The aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive place-based system failure framework for an innovation policy design that is suitable to initiate and support economic renewal processes in different region-specific contexts. Our framework rests on three pillars. The first one draws a distinction between barriers that relate to rigidities of the current industrial, knowledge and institutional structures on the one hand and impediments that hinder the emergence of new development paths on the other hand. The second conceptual cornerstone differentiates between various forms of new path development, namely path upgrading, modernization, branching, importation and new path creation. Third, to capture varying regional characteristics, we distinguish between thin, thick and specialised and thick and diversified regions. Our conceptual discussion demonstrates that each region type suffers from particular combinations of barriers to structural change. This offers a sound basis for assessing which types of new path development are most likely to occur in thin, thick and specialised and thick and diversified regions and for identifying promising policy approaches to fashion regional structural change in various regional contexts