Alessandro Rosiello

• Chair Innovation & Entrepreneurship at University of Edinburgh

This study focusses on knowledge absorption in SMEs and their abilities to develop innovations. It does so by examining SMEs in three different economic sectors, namely, manufacturing, high-tech and services. In doing so it provides one of the first comparative studies of SMEs within these different sectors. It also examines variations by place and...

This study focusses on knowledge absorption in SMEs and their abilities to develop innovations. It does so by examining SMEs in three different economic sectors, namely, manufacturing, high-tech and services. In doing so it provides one of the first comparative studies of SMEs within these different sectors. It also examines variations by place and...

Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) research has contributed to better understanding of that policy framework’s conceptual underpinnings but some European regions still find it difficult to turn S3 theory into policy implementation. A key element of the implementation challenge concerns the enabling or constraining role of local institutions on regi...

Smart specialization is studied in the Arab–Jewish region of Haifa and Nazareth, with a focus on high-tech ventures created by Arab entrepreneurs. We find that not only did smart specialization occur under these complex conditions, but also it was spontaneous. It began with the sharing of entrepreneurial knowledge held by Jewish entrepreneurs throu...

Over the last twenty years, a Schumpeterian and evolutionary tradition has emerged regarding the analysis of technological regimes, sectoral patterns of innovative activity and sectoral systems. This research tradition started from the evidence that technologies differ and that industries present a wide variety of patterns of innovative activities...

This article contributes to the ongoing debate about whether, how, and under what conditions latecomer countries can become producers of new technology and innovation, thereby catching up with technological leaders. Recent work on sectoral systems of innovation and in the evolutionary economics literature suggests that successful latecomers can mov...

It identifies the alignment of interests between the University DDI Programme and key private and public organisations in Fife; and, it evaluates options, recommending potential next steps. We identify specific opportunity areas for DDI activities across the eight key sectors identified in the Fife Economic Strategy 2017-2027 (i.e. energy and ren...

As the COVID-19 pandemic devastated social and economic fabric of most countries, high-growth small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were looked upon to provide the starting point for eventual recovery. This is based on the growing notion of resilience being driven by both entrepreneurial agility as well as strategic planning capacity, giving ris...

This commentary argues that scaling fast growth firms drive economic development, even in recessionary periods. While the coronavirus induced the ‘Great Lockdown’ and its aftermath poses particular challenges, we argue that the crisis presents the entrepreneurial scholarly community with an opportunity to re-orientate our research. Rather than more...

This paper is building a detailed understanding of the organisational structures and practices in SMEs' knowledge absorption from a network of innovation partners. In particular, it explores the relationship between the openness of innovation process through innovation networks and the development of organisational structures within firms, as well...

Our study employs a social network perspective to investigate the influence of firms’ structural and relational embeddedness on their innovation outcome in a directed network in a mature industrial cluster. From the structural embeddedness perspective, we argue that a central position in an informal advice network does not bring equal innovation be...

Entrepreneurs have been increasingly benefitting from the support of HEIs. The latter can help faculty in their ventures by providing them with information, specific training, funding, working space, etc. The entrepreneurial and innovative HEI can promote entrepreneurship in its ecosystem, thus promoting inclusive growth. In Romania, HEIs struggle...

Using network analysis, we investigate if an industry's complex and integrated knowledge base leads to a higher spatial concentration (or dispersal) of innovative activities. This is important because the extant literature provides competing claims about how knowledge base complexity impacts on the spatial distribution of industrial innovation. To...

In this paper, we investigate the implementation challenge of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in catch-up regional environments, through the lens of capacity building. We analyse capacity building at two levels: micro-level (individual organisations) and meso-level (regional inter-organisational networks). We use empirical evidence from 50 int...

Inter-firm relationships or networks play a vital role in the transfer of knowledge among firms. Firm characteristics, relational attributes, and network structural properties are important determinants of the formation and dynamics of these networks. However, the role of such attributes and properties in explaining the dynamics of multiple network...

Informal networks among manufacturing firms play an important role in the transfer of knowledge in industrial clusters. Proximity facilitates the networking process; however, empirical evidence on the relationship between multiple proximity dimensions and different kinds of innovation networks is scarce. Using multiple regression quadratic assignme...

The debate as to whether, how and under which conditions latecomers in an ever more interconnected global economy can become significant producers of new technology and innovation has significant implications for industrial and economic policy. Technological catch-up can lead to higher productivity, economic growth and an increase in living standar...

The Scottish referendum of 2014 encouraged massive public debate, including on Scotland’s scientific performance and ability to harness innovation and increase global competitiveness. The science base in Scotland has traditionally been strong but has not translated well into innovation. This article uses statistical data, over 30 interviews and two...

This article analyzes important changes in technological innovation in the upstream petroleum industry. It provides evidence that shifts in sectoral patterns of innovation over the petroleum industry's lifecycle from the 1970s up to 2005 were dependent on the dynamics of knowledge base complexity (KBC), a key dimension of an industry's technologica...

This article investigates the relationship between the dynamics of knowledge base complexity and shifts in the international geography of innovation, with important implications for the process of technological catch-up. Empirical evidence from the upstream petroleum industry is used to explain why some catching-up countries are taking advantage of...

Recent debate on industrial policy has shifted toward innovation-related issues and economic geography. The conceptual strength and practical implementation of some of these approaches is of concern, particularly the strategic approach termed 'smart specialisation' and its focus on prioritising economic activities with greater potential for growth...

This paper proposes that shifts in sectorial patterns of innovation over the industry?s lifecycle partly depend upon the dynamics of knowledge base complexity. Knowledge base complexity is considered as one of the important dimension of technological regimes which define sectorial knowledge environment and shape the sectorial patterns of innovation...

This special issue reflects on innovation and industrial policy from the premise that economic growth can be based on the permanent transformation of an economic system via the emergence and/or transformation of multi-agent structures and their inherent competences and knowledge base. The process of emergence or transformation is conceived as being...

The focus of this paper is on Lithuania, whose government released an ambitious innovation strategy to become an innovative services hub for Northern Europe by 2015, and an innovation hub by 2020. Biotechnology has been identified as a strategic sector, and whether Lithuania will be able to achieve its ambition of a fully functioning biotechnology...

The encouragement of innovation at the regional level has been the subject of a series of EU initiatives, but there is, as yet, no overarching framework that provides clear, effective and widely accepted guidance for policy-makers. We identify some of the limitations facing innovation policy in Europe and put forward some ideas based on interdiscip...

This article suggests that successful innovation in biopharmaceuticals is strongly related to the ability of firms to move compounds forward along the drug pipeline, relatively to other companies, within the same therapeutic area. We used this intuition to build indicators of performance at the firm-level and use them to conduct empirical analysis...

Bio-clusters have been at the centre of regional dynamics in the last ten years. The fact that they allow innovation and competitiveness to emerge through intense interactions between various agents in close geographic proximity has stimulated the interest of policy-makers with aspirations to establish biotechnology presence in their regions. Howev...

When compared to the U.S. and Israel, the weak venture capital (VC) markets and VC policy in Europe up to the early 2000s stimulated two alternative streams of research. A majority view, which we term traditional, focuses on the role of VC in overcoming market failure in the financing of innovative ventures. The policy recommendations emerging from...

Despite many attempts to develop high-impact venture capital (VC) policies, most VC markets in Europe are still underdeveloped. Many of these policies were based on ‘traditional’ (Rosiello et al, 2009) VC policy involving a mix of monetary incentives and institutional changes. In this article, we present an alternative evolutionary VC policy, which...

This paper focuses on the patterns of venture capital (VC) investment in dedicated biotech firms (DBFs) in the therapeutic and diagnostic sectors (bio-healthcare). We use a database of 655 UK bio-healthcare deals to map the geographical flows of VC investment and measure the co-location of investors and DBFs. Then, using 20 face-to-face interviews...

This paper describes Scottish Enterprise (SE) 'Framework for Action' in life sciences and examines its effectiveness through the lenses of cluster theory and selected concepts from the literature on market and systemic failure. The focus is on the framework's capability to improve the competitive performances of biotechnology firms and strengthen n...

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are perhaps the key emergent theme in the delivery of what the socio-economic literature terms global public goods. In light of the problems relating to the distribution of health services and products in developing countries, partnerships between public and private institutions are often proposed as an innovative...

This paper adopts a system-evolutionary perspective to describe the dynamics of the life science sector and reflect on regional innovation policy. It begins with a brief outline of the evolution of life sciences and of the biotechnology industry. A crucial feature of such evolution is the strong tendency towards geographical concentration of resear...

Modern biotechnology is one of the key enabling technologies of the 21st century with a potentially wide range of applications in many sectors, including health, agriculture and industrial processes. Considering the potential of modern biotechnology to contribute to the achievement of major European Union policy goals, such as economic growth and j...

This paper addresses themes at the heart of policy debates on innovation systems and concentrates on the process of progressive transformation that has been affecting the therapeutic and diagnostic sectors as a result of the application of molecular biology. The focus is on the relationship between firms' locational choices, innovation policy and i...

This paper focuses on the desirability of different modes of governance in the context of the Scottish biotechnology cluster. The objective is to design theoretical models able to predict organizational choices made by firms seeking access to key complementary assets. Inspiration is drawn from two distinct streams of research: transaction cost econ...

We compare some of the policies that have been attempted in Europe (UK/Scotland) and Israel over the past fifteen years to elaborate a new Systems Evolutionary (SE) framework for rethinking VC policy and related ITP. We argue that this perspective is useful for both real world (‘positive’) analysis and policy (‘normative’) analys is. Our SE framewo...