Ana Paula Delgado, CEDRES, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto, Portugal, Porto, Portugal, Aurora A. C. Teixeira, CEMPRE, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto, Portugal, Porto, Portugal
International Regional Patterns of Well-Succeed R&D Alliances - what Regional Innovation Systems have to do with it? (assigned to theme
The 1980s saw the confluence of several complementary notions connecting technology and regional development policies. These brought into combination high tech industry, science park developments, technology networking and regional innovation policies. In the early 1990s regional scientists began to compose some of the elements they had studying separately, such as the existence of regionalized technology complexes and major ‘technopolis’ arrangements. Research on particular regions linking together networking, technology transfer and vocational training constituted key pillars in the emergence of the so-called Regional Innovation Systems (RIS). Unquestionably, there was a trend towards networking and cooperation as a competitive strategy by smaller firms, among each other as subcontratctors or towards large firms as suppliers. Collaboration means more opportunity for firms to share in bulk purchasing, joint market, basic training, but on the other hand, when it comes to innovation, firms will also need to be competitive. In this sense, it is necessary to identify the ‘optimal’ mix of collaboration and competition for a given industry and /or region. This means to identify those activities best conducted collaboratively. As the economic coordination becomes increasingly globalized, the key interactions among firms become regionalized. Region innovation policies increasingly derived their parameters from a global horizon of different development paths, technological options, product life-cycles, etc., trying to simultaneously take into account regional policy objectives such as employment, income, taxation and welfare development. At the European level, significant efforts have been made to stimulate SME co-operative efforts as a way to overcome their research handicaps and scantiness of innovative inputs and as a booster of regional development. Co-operative research (CRAFT) is one of the main supporting measures within the EU Framework Programmes targeting R&D needs of SMEs and aiming at facilitate transnational co-operation between SMEs and Europe’s research community. In the present paper, using a database of 188 ‘success stories’ of completed CRAFT projects, we attempt to obtain an international regional picture of their spatial distribution relating it with the associated RIS strength. This arguably will permit to draw some policy recommendation namely concerning the indispensable conditions that regions need to reap the advantages of cooperative projects.
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