Workshop 4:
Enterprises and Regional Development (Part 1)
Thursday 8 June at 15.00-17.00
Chair: Markku Wilenius
Regional Impact of Global and European Integration
Paavo Okko (Economics, Department of Economics, Turku School of Economics, Finland)
After the Eastern enlargement of the EU the whole Europe has come into a fundamentally different stage of the integration process. The process will go on in special circumstances in which the global competition is increasing at the same time. This will end up into changes in industrial and regional structures. Are we having a stronger Europe with a deeper and wider integration and better results in the global competition? One aspect of the problem is that “The old Europe” is a post-industrial society facing strong competition from emerging industrial economies of Asia and from “the new Europe”, too.
There is a strong tendency towards factor price equalisation and towards income convergence. But regional differences may become even deeper via this process. There are very large income differences among member countries of the large EU. Differences are assumed to diminish, but it seems impossible to happen without a fundamental regional restructuring.
The target of the paper is to make a survey on income convergence and regional restructuring literature in the case of European integration. Especially the endogenous growth theory and models of the new economic geography offer a relevant approach to these issues. The idea is to make an evaluation and prediction on the real convergence prospects of the large EU. Eastern enlargement is an opportunity to faster growth in Europe, but the regional specialization and restructuring is a crucial condition for materializing of this result.
Contribution of Investment in Research to Regional Development
Tibor Dory (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, EC DG Joint Research Centre, Sevilla, Spain)
Research and development (RTD) policy is a central issue for a fraction of regions in Europe because the majority of these sub-national entities have limited governance autonomy and RTD policy competences. Regional measures are to a large extent restricted to innovation policy and predominantly focus on developing diffusion and absorption capacities in the regions and on creating links between academia and business. It seems, however, that uniform measures throughout Europe do not support the convergence process of regions towards the state of development of the small group of technological and economic leaders. Instead, evidence indicates a convergence process towards several different states of development within clusters of regions with similar technological and economic structure.
Taking this underlying assumption for the analysis, the spoken paper will discuss identified key socio-economic and policy issues in three types of European regions: 1) predominantly agricultural low-income economies, 2) re-industrialising low-to-medium-income economies (i.e. the “industrial catchers-up” in the new Member States) and 3) diversified or newly industrialised medium-income economies of the EU15. Based on regional case study reports, the analysis will focus on the following two dimensions of a regional innovation system and the in-between linkages: i) the regional knowledge base and ii) regional economic structure. Apart from these aspects, the paper will also present identified trends with regard to R&D and innovation, policy challenges, conflicts and synergies between different policies.
Keywords: regional innovation, RTD policy, prospective
The Continuous Success of Technology-Based Clusters Outside the World’s Metropolis Regions
Jukka Teräs (Norrum Oy, Helsinki, Finland), Päivi Iskanius (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, University of Oulu, Finland)
Technology-based clusters, such as Silicon Valley in California, U.S., and Cambridge, U.K., have received a great deal of attention, both in the academic world and in the public policy arena. The well-documented advantages for innovation, including the latest information of the new technological and market opportunities through the cluster’s institution and networks have been noticed. Also, the ICT growth of regions like Oulu in Northern Finland clearly shows that high-tech cluster success is possible even outside the world’s so-called technological metropolis regions.
What are, then, preconditions for an effective supply of innovation and the continuous success of these high-tech clusters, especially in rural regions? The rapidly changing international business environment has remarkable effects on the high technology clusters. New players (e.g. China) enter the market and change the traditional picture of the world’s high technology R&D and marketing. Rural regions face the increasing threat of so-called low-cost countries not only in production but also in the field of R&D.
Innovation is a key factor of the company’s success and has become increasingly important in the global competition. But what are the elements that speed up the innovation creation? How to adapt innovations into business, especially taking into account the radically reducing time-to-market, when introducing new innovations to international, or global, marketplace? What are the key elements to push up the development of innovation networks? Our paper will highlight these questions by reviewing the large amount of literature combined with up-to-date information gathered by interviews of key interest groups in this matter.