The main purpose of this Handbook is to provide overviews and assessments of the state-of-the-art regarding research methods, approaches and applications central to economic geography. The chapters are written by distinguished researchers from a variet

This volume covers the topic of innovation in three sections, first demonstrating that processes of innovation and technological change are spatially differentiated, second examining the increasing importance of knowledge creation and diffusion, and third raising key issues related to the systems of innovation approach as a conceptual framwork for regional innovation analysis. Includes enlightening conceptual and empirical work on the issue of how knowledge spills over locally.

Within the European context of innovation for growth, public and corporate actors are faced with pressing questions concerning innovation policy and the return on public and private investment in innovation at the regional level. To help them answer these questions, researchers in the field of Geography of Innovation propose interesting developments and new perspectives for the analysis of localized innovation processes, interactions between science, technology and industry, and their impact on regional growth and competitiveness, offering new foundations for designing and evaluating public policies. The aim of this book is firstly to highlight major recent methodological advances in the Geography of Innovation, particularly concerning the measurement of spatial knowledge externalities and their impact on agglomeration effects. Strategic approaches using microeconomic data have also contributed to showing how firms’ strategies may interact with the local environment and impact upon agglomeration dynamics. Interesting new results emerge from the application of these new methodologies to the analysis of innovation dynamics in European regions and this book shows how they can help revisit some of the main tenets of received wisdom concerning the rationale and impact of public policies on the Geography of Innovation. This book was previously published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

This book offers a geographic dimension to the study of innovation and product commercialization. Building on the literature in economics and geography, this book demonstrates that product innovation clusters spatially in regions which provide concentrations of the knowledge needed for the commercialization process. The book develops a conceptual model which links the location of new product innovations to the sources of these knowledge inputs. The geographic concentration of this knowledge fonns a technological infrastructure which promotes infonnation transfers, and lowers the risks and the costs of engaging in innovative activity. Empirical estimation confinns that the location of product innovation is related to the underlying technological infrastructure, and that the location of the knowledge inputs are mutually reinforcing in defining a region's competitive advantage. The book concludes by considering the policy implications of these fmdings for both private finns and state governments. This work is intended for academics, policy practitioners and students in the fields of innovation and technological change, geography and regional science, and economic development. This work is part of a larger research effort to understand why the location of innovative activity varies spatially, specifically the externalities and increasing returns which accrue to location. xi Acknowledgements This work has benefitted greatly from discussions with friends and colleagues. I wish to specifically note the contribution of Mark Kamlet, Wes Cohen, Richard Florida, Zoltan Acs and David Audretsch. I would like to thank Gail Cohen Shaivitz for her dedication in editing the final manuscript.

In an era of intense globalization, the critical role of the region as a center for economic development has sometimes been overlooked. Moreover, innovation is increasingly being recognized as being a critical driver of economic growth and development. However, innovation is no longer being seen as a function of research and development; nor is R&D being seen as being sufficient for the creation of technology-intensive industries and the valuable economic spillovers that result in high value-added jobs and exports. Indeed, much more than ever before, it is the combination of factors that contributes to innovation - ranging over skills, finance, production, user-producer linkages, the capacity of organizations to learn, and multilayered government policies - that make local regions the favorites of fortune. Using an evolutionary economic perspective, and drawing on a range of disciplines and accomplished scholars, Local and Regional Systems of Innovation explores important issues at a conceptual, methodological and comparative level concerning how successful locations actually construct their comparative advantage.

The contributions in this volume extend our understanding about the different ways distance impacts the knowledge conversion process. Knowledge itself is a raw input into the innovation process which can then transform it into an economically useful ou