Francisco Mas-Verdú

Los países adoptan diferentes políticas y estrategias para impulsar el crecimiento y la competitividad regional. La I+D es uno de los motores más importantes de la competitividad nacional por su capacidad de generar conocimientos y convertirlos en información útil para mejorar la vida de las personas y mantener la prosperidad económica. La innovación surge dentro de los sistemas de innovación. Estos sistemas fomentan la colaboración entre los agentes institucionales y económicos. Uno de los principales grupos de agentes que propician dicha colaboración son los intermediarios de la innovación. Los centros tecnológicos (CT) son un ejemplo excelente de estos intermediarios, que ejercen un impacto positivo en el sector empresarial. Dados los numerosos factores que influyen en la eficiencia de los CT, este artículo estudia las variables clave asociadas a esta eficiencia, proporcionando una clasificación de estas variables basada en las opiniones de los expertos en sistemas de innovación. Para evaluar estas variables, se utiliza el Proceso de Jerarquía Analítica (en inglés, Analytic Hierarchy Process, AHP). De las seis áreas identificadas como esenciales para la actividad de los CT, el impacto de los CT y los tipos de acciones que llevan a cabo son los aspectos más importantes para mejorar la eficiencia de los CT y las empresas, así como la competitividad regional. Este estudio destaca el papel de los CT para ayudar a las empresas a responder a retos con soluciones innovadoras que fomenten un sector empresarial regional fuerte, competitivo e innovador.

European Political Science (EPS) has been a leading political science journal since its launch in 2001. This article examines the contribution of European Political Science over its 20-year history. The bibliometric analysis draws on Web of Science data and VOSviewer software. These tools help detect collaboration networks, bibliographic coupling and co-citations to identify the most relevant topics and knowledge appearing in European Political Science . The evaluation of EPS reveals four areas of interest: migration, education, comparative politics and democracy. Recent interests include the current debate on populisms, social media and political parties, with antecedents and implications that transcend national boundaries.

This paper assesses the origins, evolution and prospects of national innovation systems (NISs) using bibliometric techniques. All available data in the Web of Science Core Collection database up to and including the year 2017 are considered in the analysis. Both the number of NIS studies and the number of citations of these studies reflect the influence of this topic and the attention and growing interest of the scientific community, public administrations and international organisations in NIS research. The co-citation analysis of cited references provides a historical view of the origins of the NIS, and the bibliographic coupling between the documents gives a current overview of the status of NIS research. Our approach highlights the fact that many studies belong to previous, well-developed research streams. We also examine the topics covered by recent studies in each stream and the evolution of the most common keywords over time. In conclusion, we propose a research agenda based on three pillars: (1) the adaptation of innovation systems to the current global economic crisis and the application of the Quintuple Helix model to deal with this new scenario, (2) the adaptation of innovation systems to developing countries and (3) the specific fit of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial innovations into NIS research.

Based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this paper examines the interactions between the presence or absence of regional and national top-ranked research universities and other innovation-related conditions that foster regional competitiveness in the European Union context. We evaluated the effect of a region’s membership in different regional clusters as characterized by the following conditions: inter-firm collaboration in innovation activities, public R&D expenditure, private R&D expenditure as well as ranking in the list of the world’s top 300 (or top 100) universities. As one region might benefit from the presence of a local top-ranked university and/or from spillover effects from other national universities, we distinguish between the presence of universities within the region or elsewhere in the same country. Our results suggest that some conditions are necessary to achieve the outcome of being a “competitive region,” including having at least one top-300-ranked university in the same country (EU member state). Nevertheless, this attribute is not individually sufficient to incur the outcome of regional competitiveness. Our findings support the idea that the closeness of top-ranked universities does not itself guarantee regional competitiveness; instead, having an excellent research university within the same member state is only one of numerous configurations which may lead to a region’s success. These results support evidence in recent literature that leading research universities may be geographically connected to a wide network of actors with external knowledge interactions.

(2019). Special issue: clustering and innovation: firm-level strategizing and policy. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development: Vol. 31, Clustering and innovation: Firm-level strategizing and policy, pp. 1-6.

Shifting away from traditional approaches orientated towards the analysis of the benefits associated with brokerage, this paper provides valuable insights into the dynamics of this network position and the opportunities to innovate that it provides. Using fine grain micro data collected in a foodstuff Spanish cluster, the evolution of different brokerage profiles is analyzed in depth. It was particularly evident how firm-level characteristics (status, former mediating experience and external openness) and their interactions may generate changes in the different brokerage roles over a period of time. The findings of this work partially validate expectations based on the network dynamics approaches. Status and previous mediating experience facilitate the creation of partnerships, fostering brokerage. Conversely, interaction effects demote brokerage activity at the intra-cluster level, suggesting the selective nature of brokers’ relational behavior.