Increasing the Innovative Capacity of European Cities: Making Use of Proven Concepts from the National Level.

Abstract

Besides facing challenges like globalization, agglomeration, digitalization, and demographical change, a nation finds its growth and development to be strongly influenced by its innovativeness. Innovation emanates from interaction and knowledge flows, and countries systems of innovation shape the manifold innovation processes. Cities are the focal point of these processes, as they serve as regional hubs that facilitate the interplay between all involved actors and the exchange of related knowledge. Consequently, cities as fonts of innovation are central to policymakers concerns. Despite cities high value as a unit of analysis, few studies have investigated strategies leading to a high innovative capacity in cities. However, much research has occurred at the national level. Among this, one study introduces an innovative methodology to identify so called pathways to success for European member states using a comparative method. As the national level is an aggregate of the lower levels, the authors assume that such proven concepts from the national level also apply to cities and claim that different innovation strategies with the same outcome exist, thus allowing cities to define appropriate policies in line with their specific preconditions. The few academic works on the determinants of innovative capacity of European (secondary) capital cities, as well as several practical studies in this field, provide first evidence of the truth of this theory. Drawing on these fragmented sources, the authors propose a consolidated set of 43 variables reflecting a local innovation ecosystem, thus setting the scene for a quantitative proof of the concept in the future.