Learning about innovation in Europe’s regional policy

Abstract

In the good old times scholars and practitioners arguing in favor of a regional dimension of innovation policies felt like being the avant-garde of new, forward-looking thinking against the old-fashioned conventional wisdom, according to which “grand” industrial policy inherently required the full strength of the Nation State or – for some – the new European “super-State”. The former looked for answers from a new territorial and systemic perspective, paying particular attention to SMEs and endogenous capacities rather than searching from exogenous help by, for example, luring inward investment, typically branch plants from multinational companies, through fiscal incentives . At the same time, the emphasis on innovation implied a departure from traditional regional policies, focused on the transfer of resources from “rich” to “poor” areas and on providing basic infrastructures to disadvantaged regions in the name of cohesion objectives.