Innovation and SMEs in Interreg policy: too early to move beyond bike lanes?

ABSTRACT

Since 1989 the European Commission’s policy on border regions has slowly shifted focus. Current Interreg policy is increasingly focused upon innovation and cooperation between SMEs. In this paper we question whether this emphasis on firms and innovation neglects the build-up of other kinds of activities and institutions antecedent to effective firm innovation cooperation. We argue that antecedent developments should occur prior to stimulating innovation cooperation between firms, highlighting that building effective environments for regional innovation in cross-border regions encompasses four qualitatively different micro scale phases of development, each requiring qualitatively different policy measures. This four-phase model is applied to a case study of a Dutch-Flemish Interreg programme, using documentary material, a policy-maker survey and a documentary analysis of funded projects to explore incoherences between strategy and reality. We highlight a gap between the strategy’s strong ex ante focus upon innovation, policy-maker perceptions of necessary improvements, and the projects selected for funding.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• borders
• policy
• SMEs
• Interreg
• CBRIS

Acknowledgements

Jos van den Broek is grateful for the time and support from ERAC BV to conduct this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jos van den Broek is a senior researcher at the Rathenau Instituut.

Roel Rutten is Assistant Professor at the Department of Organization Studies of Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

Paul Benneworth is a senior researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the Institute of Innovation and Governance Studies, University of Twente, the Netherlands and a senior researcher at NORCE.

ORCID

Jos Van Den Broek http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9754-1206

Paul Benneworth http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0539-235X

Notes

1 We are not looking at public sector innovation, whilst we acknowledge that this played an important role in cross-border policy development (Perkmann, 2007).

2 Although Van Houtum (1998) starts at the point of a first contact, we add an additional step, pre-cooperation phase.

3 In this study, we studied 15 SMEs working on cross-border collaborative innovation projects to explore how the border impacted upon the different phases of their collaboration process. These SMEs received funding from Interreg to develop their projects and where thus one of the target groups of the policy discussed here. For a complete discussion see Van den Broek, Benneworth, and Rutten (2018).

4 In total 11 policymakers completed the survey, two indicated they did not have enough knowledge of the subject to complete the survey and 1 policymaker did not work on cross-border issues anymore and was therefore unavailable.

5 In total 39,200 people commute from Belgium to the Netherlands of which 22,500 are Dutch nationals living in Belgium. Another 1,900 people with other nationalities than Dutch or Belgian commute from Belgium to the Netherlands for work. In the opposite direction there are in total 8,100 people living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium. Next to the Dutch people commuting to Belgium there are 3,300 people with a Belgian nationality living in the Netherlands and working in Belgium.

6 There is a fourth priority called technical assistance, but as this is only about management of the program it is not related to the content of the programme.