Elvira Uyarra

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Manchester

In this paper, we review recent research on the impact of public procurement with a focus on methods and data. The growing interest in mobilizing procurement for strategic purposes, such as innovation, economic growth, social value, and sustainable development, has brought to light significant knowledge gaps on the impact of public procurement on p...

In this paper we enrich the concept of place-based leadership. Building on social movement theory, our analysis of the clean growth mission development in Greater Manchester (UK) reveals the role of place-based leadership in mobilising and coordinating framing processes that linked the global climate change problem with local challenges, articulate...

This paper explores the operationalization of policy directionality in terms of goal consistency as well as the spatial dimensions of problems and solutions. The study focuses on cross-border regions (CBRs), since they are engaged in cooperation to tackle common challenges. This study employs a comparative analysis across two EU CBRs, drawing on a...

The UK exhibits stark regional economic divides which have been a long running concern for policymakers. With the levelling up agenda taking shape, city-regions in the UK are developing innovation and business support policies in seeking to deliver on a range of goals from traditional productivity concerns to wider social and environmental imperati...

Public procurement has gained a heightened role in responding to grand societal challenges. Additional goals besides the more traditional objectives for public procurement have produced conflicts and raised the question of how to assess public procurement comprehensively. In this article, we explore the impact model created for the National Public...

This article is OpenAccess: click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02690942231170135. Given the global imperative to meet ‘net zero’, and growing interest in the potential for green jobs growth, there is an urgent need to better understand the drivers and processes underlying green structural economic transitions. How should we...

This Special Issue represents an effort to go beyond a narrow notion of knowledge exchange (KE) and explicitly address broader questions related to the measurement of and incentives towards KE in Higher education institutions (HEI). Specifically, we bring attention to a number of under-researched topics in the literature. These relate to: (i) The p...

Thinking about regional industrial policies remains focused on the supply of new knowledge, and recently also on grand challenges and missions, but takes problems, demand and market formation largely for granted. In this paper we build on policy sciences, sociology of markets and valuation approaches to explore the place-based roles of agency, inst...

Regional resilience, understood as the regional ability to resist, adapt to, and create new regional paths from external shocks, is one of the most explored issues in the last years in the literature of evolutionary economic geography. However, most of the literature has focused on analysing the regional responses in terms of structural economic ch...

The study of innovation dynamics has expanded widely in recent decades. However, it has failed to include research focusing on the social process and demonstrating the mechanisms of a given system's innovative capacity, thus resulting in the fragmentation of theoretical approaches rather than the construction of a cohesive framework. Based on the a...

This paper explores the scope for system-level agency in new path creation. We identify the roles and challenges for state-led path creation and illustrate them through a case study of a novel and ongoing set of institutional entrepreneurship and system-building activities in the Galicia region of Spain, looking at the practices, relational process...

Combining insights from evolutionary economic geography and socio-technical transition studies, this article provides a conceptual framework and a theory-informed empirical analysis of policy dimensions for regional green restructuring. The combination of these two perspectives allows the application and confrontation of analytical concepts with th...

We review the literature on regional economic resilience and discuss how it interrelates with systems of governance, local sustainability and inclusive growth. Resilience is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon shaped by pre-existing structural conditions, networks as well as institutional and governance configurations. We discuss the Greater Manc...

Drawing on the concept of human capital externalities, this paper investigates universities’ contribution to regional economies by analysing two types of graduate retention: labour retention (graduates employed in the region where they studied) and entrepreneurship retention (graduates starting businesses in the region where they studied). Using a...

Research on a topic as intricate as climate change and adaptation can be seen as a complex ecosystem combining thousands of projects by a large set of actors. This article studies the EU Seventh Framework Program funded projects to understand how research has been funded and managed in Europe to develop a specific knowledge ecosystem around climate...

Recent thinking about innovation and industrial policy emphasises purposeful related diversification strategies or more transformative—but potentially riskier—challenge-orientated policies. Meanwhile public procurement is increasingly seen as a key means of fostering innovation. We conceptualize the multiple roles of public procurement in an innova...

There is an interest in understanding the effect of economic crises such as the one that hit the financial markets in the late 2000s, on the innovation performance of countries and regions. This article introduces the concept of ‘resilience of innovation’ to illustrate how the economic slowdown affects firms’ behaviour in terms of their ability to...

There has been strong policy interest in universities becoming more entrepreneurial and engaging in knowledge exchange activities as part of an expanding third mission agenda. However, our understanding of the evolution and diversity of such activities is limited. Using longitudinal data from the Higher Education Business Community Interaction (HEB...

The perceived ineffectiveness of traditional innovation policies in solving societal challenges such as poverty, ageing, climate change as well as problems of regional economic restructuring has motivated a recent ‘normative turn’ in innovation policy. This has shifted the debate on the rationales for intervention from market and system failures to...

The emergence of Smart Specialisation as place-based policy has attracted much scholarly debate. However, interest on the topic has been devoted principally to the process of entrepreneurial discovery and its embedded selective mechanisms for R&I policy. This paper focuses on a less investigated dimension of Smart Specialisation, and specifically o...

Innovation is related to economic cycles. Often seen as a procyclical phenomenon, many innovation actors try and succeed in maintaining (and even increasing) their innovation efforts to gain competitive advantage during the crises. In this chapter, departing from the recent developments in regional studies, which understand resilience as an evoluti...

This research explores how a research university develops its academic entrepreneurial ecosystem (AEE) through building up process mechanisms, thereby improving the academic entrepreneurship efficiency. We propose an individual-organisation-environment-process model, which we illustrate with the case study of Zhejiang University. Our findings pinpo...

Public procurement is frequently touted as a means of promoting innovation at the sub-national level, but the underlying mechanisms through which this is supposed to work are seldom articulated. In particular, while the relevance of social interaction for innovation is offered as a key rationale for the use of public procurement for innovation, the...

The continued interest of academics and policy makers alike in understanding and replicating the vibrancy of innovation hotspots such as Silicon Valley has given rise to an extensive body of research into regional innovation dynamics, the drivers and preconditions for knowledge driven economic development and - inspired by these insights - the tool...

The prospect of limited access to natural resources has reignited the debate on environmental sustainability and the search for appropriate policy instruments. Alternative and sustainable models of production and consumption encompass both wholly new solutions as well as modified versions of existing ones. The objective of this paper is to understa...

This paper examines the evolution of the dynamics of the triple helix interactions exemplified by the case of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in England. Results highlight the persisting heterogeneity between HEIs in their combination, geography and evolution of triple helix interactions, particularly between research oriented universities and...

By looking at the case of English higher education, this paper addresses the tension between external isomorphic forces and the heterogeneous nature of knowledge exchange activities at individual universities. It adopts an ‘institutional logic’ perspective to explain the heterogeneous pathways that organisations take in response to external environ...

Smart specialisation (S3) emphasises the identification of niches, cross-sectorial innovation and solving societal challenges. With this comes a need for an outward-looking dimension, to find a region’s potential advantages in international markets, and to identify partners to help deliver new solutions and solve common challenges. This is the case...

The field of innovation policy studies is at a crossroads. It has clearly been influential. However, might it be losing the critical insight necessary to remain so in future? We discuss four dangerous tendencies seen in many innovation policy studies: idealising policy rationales and policy-makers; treating policies as tools from a toolbox; putting...

This paper uses a policy mix approach to examine the institutional and governance issues arising from the UK's support for innovation in low carbon manufacturing sectors. The paper draws on interviews with managers of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises as well as policy practitioners and industry experts. The analysis of these intervi...

This technical note analyzes international experiences and practices of public technology extension service programs. Technology extension services comprise varied forms of assistance provided directly to enterprises to foster technological modernization and improvement, with a focus on established small and mid-sized enterprises. The note discusse...

• The case of the procurement of innovation to achieve multiple objectives, including sustainability goals, increased accountability and efficiency, and triggered organisational and supplier innovation. • Procurement of innovation as a multi-objective, multi-faceted instrument. • Widespread barriers and challenges to innovation and procurement ove...

This chapter investigates academic entrepreneurship in a resource-­constrained environment. Sequential mixed methods are adopted in three stages, namely, an initial context-specific data-gathering stage, an on-line survey, and in-depth interviews. It is revealed that entrepreneurial activity is a means of becoming resource-rich in a resource-constr...

This paper addresses two knowledge gaps in the academic entrepreneurship literature; it discusses the motivations of academic entrepreneurs operating in a resource constrained environment, and in doing this, it also highlights the dynamisms of motivations over their entrepreneurial careers. Sequential mixed methods are adopted with an online survey...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to set out the process by which a smart specialisation strategy was developed for a small, peripheral economy in the European Union, the Republic of Malta. It assesses the applicability of the approach in the context of a micro-economy with an industrial structure based on a small number of foreign direct inve...

Public procurement is increasingly viewed as having important potential to drive innovation. Despite this interest, numerous barriers prevent the public sector from acting as an intelligent and informed customer. This paper seeks to understand how barriers related to processes, competences, procedures and relationships in public procurement influen...

The objective of this Smart Specialisation (S3) Platform Working Paper is to examine the role of inter-regional collaboration in national or regional Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3). It provides a conceptualisation of inter-regional collaboration within the framework of RIS3. It draws from the literature on innova...

This chapter provides a review and assessment of public procurement of innovation in the UK. Public procurement of innovation has long been of significant policy and research interest in the UK, but particularly so in the last decade. Accordingly, a host of initiatives and reports have been introduced aimed at mobilising the use of UK public procur...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamism of the motivations of academic entrepreneurs, who are operating in resource constrained environments. In-depth interviews are carried out to gather longitudinal data to investigate dynamisms, which are compared and contrasted with static motives identified from cross-sectional data gathered via a...

Innovation and entrepreneurship are the most important catalysts of dynamism in market economies. While it is known that entrepreneurial activities are locally embedded, mutual effects of entrepreneurs and their local regional environment have not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. In this article, we use agent-based simulation e...

Public procurement is increasingly seen as an important potential instrument of innovation policy. However, policy design has been underpinned largely by anecdotal evidence and without a clear theoretical or empirical basis for understanding how supplying to the public sector actually influences a firm's innovation capabilities and performance and...

Existing literature on industrial clusters indicates a symbiotic relationship between innovation and geographical concentration of firms working in similar industries. Innovative processes require different forms of knowledge and expertise, which are distributed across individuals and organisations at different levels of industrial clusters. In thi...

Universities in the UK have experienced dramatic changes since the onset of the global financial crisis, partly due to the immediate effects of the crisis, but also to the change in national government, upheavals in higher education policy and austerity measures. Increased pressure for local engagement with business has been combined with a rescali...

Pinto H., Fernandez-Esquinas M. and Uyarra E. Universities and knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) as sources of knowledge for innovative firms in peripheral regions, Regional Studies. Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) make a crucial contribution to regional innovation. Their relevance is potentially higher in peripheral territo...

The transformation of socio-technical systems to more sustainable states is more policy induced than market driven. Reflecting this, the potential for governments to direct system transformation has been widely debated. However, this debate concentrates on supply side policies and under analyses the potential for public buyers to steer system innov...

Networked infrastructures such as waste, energy, water and transport are closely linked to urban growth and underpin the economic, social and environmental performance of modern cities. At the same time places shape the transformation of such complex infrastructural systems. Managing waste is integral to sustainable urban transformation. Effective...

This chapter provides a review and assessment of public procurement of innovation in the UK. Public procurement of innovation has long been of signif-icant policy and research interest in the UK, but particularly so in the last decade. Accordingly, a host of initiatives and reports have been introduced aimed at mobilising the use of UK public procu...

Public procurement is increasingly seen as an important potential instrument of innovation policy. However, policy design has been underpinned largely by anecdotal evidence and without a clear theoretical or empirical basis for understanding how supplying to the public sector actually influences a firm's innovation capabilities and performance and...

A importância da escala regional para a implementação de políticas de inovação generalizou-se em paralelo com uma grande atenção teórica à noção de sistema regional de inovação. Apesar do seu desenvolvimento e de uma aplicação generalizada através de programas regionais na União Europeia, este conceito permaneceu relativamente ambíguo. O artigo, pa...

Evaluation of research and innovation policy faces radical challenges arising from a new policy emphasis upon demand-side measures and linked to this an understanding of innovation policy as a means to achieve societal goals. This article considers the implications for the practice of evaluation at both micro and meso-levels. It uses the exemplar o...

The concept of regional innovation systems is being consolidated in the economic development and innovation context both in the academic world and in the innovation promotion and support of state policies. As it happens with the innovation systems approach in general, the use of the concept has gone beyond its initial analytical purpose, and its us...

The importance of the regional level for the implementation of innovation policies has been generalized in parallel with greater theoretical attention to the notion of regional innovation systems. Despite the theoretical development and extensive application of the concept in the European Union's regional programmes, it remains ambiguous. This arti...

This chapter investigates academic entrepreneurship in a resourceconstrained environment. Sequential mixed methods are adopted in three stages, namely, an initial context-specific data-gathering stage, an on-line survey, and indepth interviews. It is revealed that entrepreneurial activity is a means of becoming resource-rich in a resource-constrain...

This paper investigates the nature of academic entrepreneurial engagement in a resource constrained environment. In addition to context-specific contributions, the paper adds originality to the academic entrepreneurship literature by discussing diversification strategies adopted by academic entrepreneurs, and synergies among academic entrepreneuria...

Recent years have seen the emergence, take-up and use of the term 'policy mix' by innovation policy makers and by policy analysts and scholars alike. Imported from economic policy debates, the term implies a focus on the interactions and interdependencies between different policies as they affect the extent to which intended policy outcomes are ach...

Despite the popularity of the concept 'regional innovation system' (RIS) in the academic literature and in policy practice, multiple interpretations and uses of the term coexist. For instance while some scholars view RIS as subsystems of national or sector-based systems presenting particular spatial features, other portray them as smaller-scale ver...

The impact of universities on the economic wellbeing and innovative potential of regions has been the object of intense scholarly and policy interest in the last years. Despite this interest, a clear picture is missing in relation to the roles universities are seen to play, the benefits of university activities and the mechanisms through which they...

The regional systems of innovation concept is well established in academic and practitioner discourses about innovation and economic development. As with the innovation systems approach more generally, the use of the concept has expanded significantly from its initial analytical purpose and has been extensively used to inform policy making. We iden...

Recent years have seen the emergence, take-up and use of the term 'policy mix' by innovation policy makers and by policy analysts & scholars alike. Imported from economic policy debates, the term implies a focus on the interactions and interdependencies between different policies as they affect the extent to which intended policy outcomes are achie...

The literature on Regional Systems of Innovation (RSI) has produced an extensive body of research in recent years and has been used widely as a framework for the design and implementation of policies in a variety of regional contexts. However, certain lack of clarity remains in relation to the defining elements and the dynamics of RSI, which make i...

Public procurement accounts for a significant proportion of overall demand for goods and services and is increasingly seen as an attractive and feasible instrument for furthering the goals of innovation policy. However, public procurement is already expected to address a wide range of social goals. Much of the current debate about harnessing procur...

Departing from a number of theoretical perspectives from which rationales for science, technology and innovation (STI) policy can be extracted, this paper discusses three questions. First, what rationales for public intervention can be derived from different economic theories, including theories usually associated with spatial dynamics and territor...