Cross-border regional innovation systems: conceptual backgrounds, empirical evidence and policy implications

ABSTRACT

The concept of cross-border regional innovation systems (CBRIS) surfaced in the literature on economic geography through discourses that highlighted the need for broadening innovation systems to cross-border contexts. Since these early discussions, the theoretical backgrounds of CBRIS have been elaborated through notions of geographical scale, proximity and related variety in a range of conceptual papers proposing CBRIS as a comprehensive framework for analysing regional cross-border integration. However, the empirical literature on CBRIS has failed to keep up with the advances in conceptualization. This paper discusses the reasons behind this mismatch, which means that the concept still rests upon and draws policy suggestions based on a thin evidence base. Directions for further research are pointed out by underlining the need for holistic empirical validation of the concept together with the need of understanding how suggested policy measures based on CBRIS reasoning have been implemented in border regions, and their effectiveness in promoting cross-border integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-border region
• geographical scale
• integration
• proximity
• regional innovation system
• related variety

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Professor Allan Williams and to the anonymous referees for their comments on improving the content of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Teemu Makkonen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1065-1806

Notes

1. To be precise, Trippl already made early attempts to conceptualise CBRIS in a working paper in 2006 (Trippl, 2006).

2. Also referred to as ‘trans-frontier innovation systems’ (Lundquist & Trippl, 2013).

3. To be precise, Coenen and his colleagues had presented an earlier draft of the paper at the 4th Congress on Proximity Economics held in Marseille, 17–18 June 2004.

4. Breakthrough innovations could, however, potentially turn this ‘unrelated variety’ into related variety (Castaldi, Frenken, & Los, 2014).

5. Institutional thickness in a locality is made up of strong institutional and organisational presence (e.g. firms, trade associations, etc.), the high level of interaction between these institutions and organizations, their power relations and (potential) common agendas (Amin & Thrift, 1994; Henry & Pinch, 2001), whereas institutional thinness can be caused for example by a lack of organizations and institutions, a lack of common vision, few interactions, imbalanced power relations, joint visions that oppose renewal efforts, closed networks, etc. However, an assessment of the absolute difference between institutional thinness and thickness remains challenging (Zukauskaite, Plechero, & Trippl, 2016).

6. Here, the removal of the physical barrier refers to the opening of the Öresund Bridge in 2000.

7. However, there is a working paper by Lundquist and Trippl (2009) with rudimental empirical comparisons between the Öresund region and the Centrope area and a series of descriptive profiles of innovative activities in certain CBR published by the OECD (2013).

8. A recent working paper by Muller, Zenker, Hufnagl, Héraud, and Schnabl (2015) has drawn a similar conclusion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Marie Curie Actions (Intra-European Fellowship for career development) within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the EU under Grant PIEF-GA-2013-624930 and by the project ‘Emerging Attraction’ within the programme INTERREG 4A Syddanmark-Schleswig-K.E.R.N. in the context of the European Regional Development Fund.