An evolutionary integrated view of Regional Systems of Innovation: Concepts, measures and historical perspectives

ABSTRACT

The literature on geographical systems of innovation has traditionally shown a ‘national-bias’ that has strongly affected the identification of actors, relationships and attributes operating at the sub-national scale. Indeed, the historical evolution of the regional dimension has rarely been considered (implying that history really matters only at the national level). Modes of governance have also mostly been examined from a country perspective, which neglects the complexity, heterogeneity and path dependency of multi-level governance in current innovation systems. This paper reviews the main literature on the concept of Regional Systems of Innovation (RSI), adopting an integrated view that brings together both top-down and bottom-up characteristics and evolutionary mechanisms for the purpose of identifying RSIs. After discussing conceptual problems, and the relevance and applicability of an evolutionary integrated view of RSI, the case of Italy is employed to support the argument that the historical perspective on regional cultures is often unavoidable in order to assess future opportunities for regional development.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for helpful and valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper from Suma Athreye, Ron Boschma, Nick von Tunzelmann and one anonymous referee. The author would like also to thank the participants at the conference on ‘Regionalization of Innovation Policy’, DIW, Berlin, 4–5 June 2004, for the lively and stimulating debate. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1. Friedrich List (1844) had the policy objective of amalgamating what were then parcellated and divided states into what some decades later became modern Germany.

2. For the ‘fuzziness’ of the cluster concept itself, see Gordon and McCann (2000) and Iammarino and McCann (2005). For a critical review of territorial innovation models, see Moulaert and Sekia (2003).

3. The remarkable regional divergence in growth rates observed within Europe in the last decades is largely attributable to the presence or absence of social capabilities for institutional change, especially those that stimulate high rates of technological change (see among others, Rodriguez-Pose, 1994, 1998; Fagerberg & Verspagen, 1996; Freeman, 2002).

4. Following Cooke (2001), embeddedness refers to a set of characteristics appropriate for systemic innovation and reflecting the extent to which a social community operates in terms of shared norms of cooperation, trustful interaction and untraded interdependencies (see also Dosi, 1988; Fritsch, 2001).

5. Following von Tunzelmann (2003), the broad definition of governance as ‘organizing collective action’ is adopted here, first coined by Prakash and Hart (1999).

6. Historical contingency refers to the actual existence of selection mechanisms in socio-economic processes: change is neither solely based on structural elements subject to general rules, nor purely driven by random effects. At each point in time in a system's evolution, a number of paths is theoretically possible, but only a few will be chosen by the actors because each path must conform to the logic of socio-economic dynamics (Schwerin & Werker, 2003).

7. Indeed, as emphasized by Dopfer et al. (2004), path dependency is mainly a micro-meso concept.

8. A different and complementary perspective is to integrate the ‘regionalization approach’ with the ‘regionalism approach’, the first related to the region's competence capacity, the second connected to the region's cultural base from which the degree of systemic potential stems (Cooke et al., 1997).

9. A further element that should not be disregarded given its increasing importance in innovative processes and technological change, particularly in the ICT paradigm, is the role of the demand for innovation. This implies that regions might be ranked according to their capacity to generate demand (and thus to create the conditions to provide a supply to meet this demand). The demand for innovation comes from a variety of actors (public sector, firms, social organizations) and their interactions, and it is usually difficult to detect using available information (Evangelista et al., 2002).

10. It is worth highlighting the meagreness of socio-economic analyses at the regional level in a dynamic perspective, which should in principle be the basis of any effective policy. Furthermore, data collection is associated with huge costs. However, in spite of the magnificent efforts of the EU National Institutes of Statistics and Eurostat to provide territorial variables in many domains and, more rarely, to reconstruct historical time series of, at least, regional GDP, the fundamental problem of sub-national data on innovation in the Union seems, rather surprisingly, to be rather underestimated. For instance, it is still not clear whether and to what extent the regional dimension was one of the sampling requirements in the most recent version of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS3).

11. There have recently been a few interesting attempts to investigate regional and local systems of innovation from a historical perspective (see Rantisi, 2002; Schwerin, 2004; Boschma & Wenting, 2005).

12. A number of studies have addressed the structure and performance of the Italian NSI as a whole (see, for example, Antonelli, 1988; Archibugi et al., 1991; Malerba, 1993; Evangelista et al., 1997).

13. Based mainly on Cipolla (1974) and Zamagni (1990). For a more detailed discussion see Iammarino (2005).

14. Piemonte, Valle d'Aosta, Liguria and Lombardia.

15. Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino Alto Adige; Emilia Romagna and Toscana.

16. Actually, between 1513 and 1859 Bologna was still formally part of the Catholic Church State, but was ruled by an independent local authority.

17. It is interesting to note that the provinces of Emilia-Romagna that benefited least from the general wealth and openness of the region were those in the east that had been subject to the Catholic Church State since 1500.

18. See also Boschma (2003). The literature that emphasizes the diversity of industrial district evolution is not included here for reasons of space.

19. Lazio, Umbria, Marche.

20. Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, Sicilia and Sardegna.

21. It is clearly beyond the scope of this paper to go into the details of the complex ‘Mezzogiorno problem’, although its relevance for the topic discussed here (whether and why some regions are RSIs and some are not even ‘systems’) is crucial. For a more extended discussion see Iammarino (2005).

22. One of the causes underlying poor historical accounts is indeed the scarcity of interdisciplinary studies carried out at the meso level. Excellent contributions, for examples, can be found in the work of Italian geographers on the historical evolution of the country territorial polarization. See, for example, Muscarà (1967, 1992), Bagnasco (1977), Celant (1994).

23. Indeed, some elements (rules, incentives, structural and historical similarities, etc.) seem to suggest that the whole Mezzogiorno could be considered as a ‘uniform’ macro-region but, within it, the degree of differentiation, particularly in terms of performance, is indeed quite striking.

24. To quote an example of wealth concentration, at the end of the eighteenth century 60% of the total income produced in the continental southern regions was owned by 650 families, of which 90 controlled two-thirds and 20 approximately a quarter of the total population respectively (Villani, 1973 not in refs, quoted in Zamagni, 1990).