Michaela Trippl

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Geographie und Regionalforschung

Scholarly work in economic geography and regional science has recently seen a renewed interest in spatial inequalities, driven significantly by the debate on left-behind places and the resulting geographies of discontent. The plight of left-behind places calls for new place-based policy responses that address the specific challenges of these region...

In this letter, we reflect on recent modifications of the regional innovation system (RIS) approach that have been prompted by persistent environmental, social, and economic problems. Scholars have begun to advocate a reorientation of the RIS framework towards addressing territorial sustainability challenges and have introduced the notion of challe...

Der Klimawandel stellt viele etablierte und ehemals erfolgreiche Branchen, wie die Textil-, Automobil-oder Kohleindustrie, vor die Herausforderung, einen radikalen Wandel in Richtung Nachhaltigkeit zu vollziehen. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, welche Möglichkeiten und Barrieren für solche grünen Transformationsprozesse-sogenannte grüne Pfadtran...

Zusammenfassung Unsere Zeit ist geprägt von multiplen Krisen wie dem Klimawandel, Pandemien, geopolitischen Unsicherheiten sowie der Zunahme sozialer und territorialer Ungleichheiten. Diese und andere große gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen machen einen umfassenden transformativen Wandel, also maßgebliche Umstellungen unserer Produktions- und Kon...

Regional economic resilience (RER) remains the state-of-the-art concept in economic geography to investigate regional development in times of disturbance. We seek to contribute to a transformative notion of RER, which unfolds in light of global environmental change. In our review of conceptual and empirical RER applications, we reveal three unresol...

Territorial manifestations of multiple crises and the shift of place-based innovation policies towards tackling sustainability challenges have far-reaching implications for the role of universities in regional development. Drawing on various literatures on the contributions of universities to regional development, we explore the strategies and prac...

The unpredictable impacts of sudden shocks such as the current COVID-19 pandemic or the current energy crisis accelerated by the Russia-Ukraine war have led to a renewed interest in regional economic resilience. Much of the literature focuses attention on how regional economies and industries could bounce back, that is, how they could return to the...

This editorial seeks to contribute to a critical rethinking of the regional innovation system (RIS) framework and to examine what kind of ‘reinvention’ of regional innovation policy is needed in the era of grand societal challenges. The concept of challenge-oriented regional innovation systems (CoRISs) is employed to cast light on how RISs can be r...

In recent years, regional innovation policies across Europe have relied on the smart specialisation approach to support new path development. However, its focus on endogenous knowledge flows remains a major weakness of the approach. This article argues that smart specialisation has to adopt an outward-looking approach that combines knowledge flows...

Economic geographers have studied emerging industries in regions from various perspectives, such as lifecycle, evolutionary economic geography, and systemic approaches. However, so far, they have insufficiently conceptualized the effects of institutional structures on new industry emergence. This special issue on "Emerging industries: institutions,...

Baumgartinger-Seiringer, S., D.Doloreux, R.Shearmur, M.Trippl, 2021, When history does not matter? The rise of Quebec’s wine industry, PEGIS working paper 2021/5 - http://www-sre.wu.ac.at/sre-disc/geo-disc-2021_05.pdf

This article contributes to the debate on new regional path development, proposing an analytical framework that accounts for new industries arising almost ex nihilo in places with weakly developed preconditions. The paper explores how seemingly adverse initial conditions can be translated into a new development path over time and casts light on the...

This article develops a more comprehensive understanding of innovation-based renewal of industries from a structural perspective. Arguably, established perspectives offer rather simplistic views, portraying structures as either enabling or constraining for certain forms of regional industrial change. Inspired by work in organizational institutional...

The regional innovation system (RIS) approach has become a widely used framework for examining the dynamics of innovation across space and for crafting policies to promote the innovation capacity of regions. The dominant focus has been on technological and business innovation enhancing competitiveness and economic growth. In light of persistent env...

The advent of 'connected and automated vehicles' (C/AV) is posing substantial transformation challenges for traditional automotive regions across the world. This article seeks to examine both conceptually and empirically how automotive regions reconfigure their industrial and support structures to promote new path development in the C/AV field. Dra...

Green and sustainable developments have received increasing attention in recent years due to challenges emanating from climate change and worsening environmental conditions. Although these are problems of global nature, actions have to be taken often at lower spatial scales. We focus on innovation and industrial policies and on the regional level s...

Purpose This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for analysing wide-ranging digital transformation processes of industries in regional contexts. Design/methodology/approach The paper includes theoretical work to create a conceptual framework. The paper illustrates and advances the framework by analysing examples from two clusters, one foc...

The recent debate on innovation-based structural change in Evolutionary Economic Geography is characterised by a strong focus on the rise of new industrial paths. This paper seeks to shift attention and cast light on radical innovation activities occurring within existing paths without necessarily leading to their dissolution. Departing from a syst...

The European Union (EU) Framework Programmes represent the ideal platform for exchanging knowledge potentially leading to innovation outcomes, in addition to providing vital research funds for various types of organisations (firms, universities, agencies, etc.). The present paper aims to assess whether innovativeness (‘innovation-driven’ participat...

The advent of 'connected and automated vehicles' (C/AV) is posing substantial transformation challenges on traditional automotive regions across the world. This paper seeks to examine both conceptually and empirically how automotive regions reconfigure their industrial and support structures to promote new path development in the C/AV field. Drawin...

Regions across the world are searching for ways to fashion new green growth paths and to promote green shifts in mature industries. The article aims to explore conceptually and based on illustrative empirical examples from the literature how green restructuring unfolds in regions. We propose a framework that explicates how regional preconditions in...

Recurrent economic and financial crises, globalization, digitalization, and climate change are posing major challenges for regional economies to constantly renew their industrial structures. Over the past few years much progress has been made in understanding how new path development unfolds in a regional context. Earlier contributions to the path...

Over the past few years, scholarly debates on new path development have attracted increasing attention within the economic geography literature. This work distinguishes various trajectories of regional and industrial evolution. So far, these evolutionary trajectories have been mainly conceptualized as 'positive' forms of path development. However,...

Desde a súa aparición na década de 1990, o enfoque dos sistemas rexionais de innovación (SRI) atraeu unha considerable atención por parte dos xeógrafos económicos, académicos e responsables de políticas de innovación. O enfoque SRI ocupa un lugar destacado no discurso científico sobre a desigual xeografía da innovación e os factores que explican a...

Recent research has challenged the urban bias in economic geography and innovation studies, showing that highly innovative and competitive firms are also located in peripheral regions. So far, however, analyses has focused on how firms innovate despite their unfavourable location and little has been said about the innovation benefits of peripheral...

The past years have witnessed a surge of academic interest into how new industrial paths are developed in regions. Transformation processes of existing regional industries have received less attention. This article focuses on radical innovation-based renewal processes of established paths and investigates how regional innovation systems are tacklin...

This paper examines the ways by which organizational and institutional features of regional innovation systems shape smart specialization practices in less-developed, intermediate and advanced regions. Drawing on research from 15 European regions, it shows that the implantation of smart specialization creates challenges in all three types of region...

Path creation is a key concept in economic geography. So far, particularly scholars within evolutionary economic geography have pioneered research on this topic. In this paper, we critically discuss their work and propose a broader understanding of how new economic activities emerge in regions, which we refer to as new regional industrial path deve...

Path creation is a key concept in economic geography. So far, particularly scholars within evolutionary economic geography have pioneered research on this topic. This paper critically discusses their work and proposes a broader understanding of how new economic activities emerge in regions, which is referred to here as ‘new regional industrial path...

The paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing wide-ranging 'digital transformation processes' of regional industries. We regard digital transformation as consisting of three main activities; development of scientific principles, making of digital products and services, and application of these in production and work processes. The paper a...

Regions across the world are facing to an ever-increasing extent the pressure to find solutions to adverse environmental impacts of economic development. Tackling such challenges requires major restructuring efforts by nurturing new green growth paths and promoting green shifts in mature industries. The paper aims to explore conceptually and based...

Recurrent economic and financial crises, globalisation, digitalisation and climate change are posing major challenges for regional economies to constantly renew their industrial structures. Over the past few years much progress has been made in understanding how new path development unfolds in a regional context. However, most conceptualisations an...

Recurrent economic and financial crises, globalisation, digitalisation and climate change are posing major challenges for regional economies to constantly renew their industrial structures. Over the past few years much progress has been made in understanding how new path development unfolds in a regional context. However, most conceptualisations an...

The past years have witnessed a surge of academic interest into how new industrial paths are developed in regions. Transformation processes of existing regional industries have received less attention in recent work. We introduce the notion of 'path transformation' to describe a form of path development taking place within mature industries where b...

This paper proposes a novel interpretive framework for studying migration and its implications in terms of innovation, entrepreneurship and regional development. We suggest that migration patterns and their impact should be analyzed through the lens of communities on the move (CoM): cultural communities marked by their own social capital, that is,...

Industrial districts and clusters are of utmost importance for economic growth and innovation in the European Union (EU). In this chapter, we analyse how smart specialisation policies have worked in different region types, combining cluster policies with smart specialisation ideas. Our study selects a sample of EU regions that differs strongly in t...

This article reviews recent research on regional transformation and observes that though it is increasingly acknowledged that regions depend on external connections, not much systematic analysis has gone to analysing regions as hosts of economic nodes that are differently positioned in global industrial systems. An outline of a threefold typology o...

The article engages in a critical discussion of the related variety/regional branching argument and foregrounds a more differentiated perspective on regional industrial path development. It contributes by (i) sharpening the definition of key concepts, namely specialisation and diversity, related and unrelated variety; (ii) discussing their relevanc...

How new regional growth paths emerge and what policy concepts are most adequate for nurturing their evolution constitute recurring themes in regional innovation and development studies. New industrial paths are often portrayed as the result of market-driven processes and Schumpeterian entrepreneurial efforts. This view goes along with a neoliberal...

This chapter reflects on how evolutionary economic geography (EEG) can be extended to incorporate public policy in its explanations of path development. A weakness of EEG is the poor conceptualisation of the role of the state (central, regional, local) in regional path development. It is therefore argued that a multi-scalar perspective of policy is...

Regional innovation systems (RISs) have received increasing interest from researchers and policy makers over the past three decades. The interest is driven partly by advances in theoretical analyses, partly by empirical studies of well-functioning, successful regional economies, partly by the growing interest in innovation as a source of competitiv...

Financial organizations are a vital element in the regional innovation ecology. However, they are mostly absent in accounts of regional innovation systems. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring how different financial organizations contribute to economic renewal and new path development in four Norwegian regions. The study is guided by an ev...

This chapter analyses opportunities and challenges for regional innovation policies designed to promote new path development in different types of regional innovation systems (RISs). RISs differ enormously in their capacity to develop new growth paths due to pronounced differences in endogenous potentials and varying abilities to attract and absorb...

This book discusses the latest theoretical advances in regional innovation research, presents empirical cases involving the development of regional innovation systems (RISs), and explores regional innovation policy approaches. Grounded in the extensive literature on RISs, it addresses state-of-the-art developments in light of recent theoretical adv...

Der Beitrag behandelt die Frage, welche Rolle Grenzen und Distanzen (bzw. Näheformen) für innovationsbasierte Integrationsprozesse in grenzüberschreitenden Regionen spielen. Aufbauend auf Erkenntnissen der „Proximity School“ wird zwischen verschiedenen Arten von Barrieren, welche als physische, funktionale, kognitive und institutionelle Distanzen d...

This paper seeks to provide novel insights into the effects of ethnic communities on immigrants’ entrepreneurial activities. We investigate to what extent the decision of an employed immigrant to become an entrepreneur is associated with his or her embeddedness in ethnic networks in the host region. We capture such embeddedness through various mech...

The special issue zooms in on knowledge dynamics that drive innovation processes and new path development in different regional and sectoral contexts. This investigation rests on the differentiated knowledge base approach, which offers a clear distinction between analytical, synthetic and symbolic types of knowledge and deep insights into their idi...

This paper deals with the evolution of the ICT cluster in southern Sweden. It forges a link between the literatures on cluster development and regional innovation systems (RISs), and explores both conceptually and empirically how cluster evolution is shaped by regional context conditions, including changes in the policy support structure and the kn...

Over the last two decades, the notion of institutional thickness has become a key reference for a large body of work that has sought to provide profound insights into the link between institutions and regional development. However, only few attempts have been made to reassess the concept, to improve its methodology, and to reflect on its empirical...

In recent years, we have witnessed an intensive scholarly discussion about the limitations of traditional inward looking regional innovation strategies. New policy approaches put more emphasis on promoting the external connectedness of regions. However, the institutional preconditions for collaboration across borders have received little attention...

The role of exogenous sources of new path development has been underplayed in the literature on regional industrial change so far. The aim of this article is to explore in a conceptual way under which conditions and in what ways non-local knowledge can lead to new path development in different regional innovation systems (RISs). We distinguish betw...

This article casts light on the increasingly complex geography of innovation and knowledge sourcing activities. We argue that the spatial patterns of learning and knowledge exchange vary substantially across different types of regions and industries. The article elucidates such variations by combining three analytical approaches, namely, (i) modes...

This article seeks to explain what policy approaches and policy measures are best suited for promoting new regional industrial path development and what needs and possibilities there are for such policy to change and adapt to new conditions in order to remain efficient. The article departs from the notion of Smart Specialization and discusses how r...

Recent scholarly work has enhanced our understanding of how new path development activities are enabled or constrained by ‘regional environments’, made up of pre-existing industrial structures, knowledge organizations, support structures and institutional configurations. This paper moves beyond overly static views on regional environments. We devel...

The aim of this article is to explore how new industrial paths emerge and grow in peripheral regional economies. Current conceptualizations of regional path development are based on experiences from core regions and fail to provide satisfactory theoretical explanations of new path-creating activities in peripheral areas. Our conceptual approach com...

Hochschulen können neben ihren traditionellen Funktionen Forschung und Lehre vielfältige Beiträge zur Entwicklung von Regionen leisten. Zunehmend wird dies von ihnen eingefordert – das Elfenbeinturm-Modell zur Beziehungsbeschreibung zwischen Hochschulen, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft hat ausgedient. In der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung herrscht in...

The literature on universities’ contributions to regional development is broad and diverse. A precise understanding of how regions may draw advantages from various university activities and the role of public policy institutions in promoting such activities is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for analysing universities...

The past two decades have witnessed an ever-growing scholarly interest in regional clusters. The focus of research has mainly been on exploring why clusters exist and what characteristics “functioning” clusters possess. Although the interest in more dynamic views on clusters is not new, in recent years, however, greater attention has been paid to p...

The aim of this article is to examine conceptually and empirically how innovative firms combine knowledge (1) provided by different sources, (2) accessed at different spatial scales and (3) acquired through different channels. We add to the conceptual debate by contrasting and synthesising the perspectives offered on these issues by four key concep...

Over the last three decades, literature on industrial districts, innovative milieus, and industrial clusters has enriched our knowledge about endogenous factors and processes driving regional development and the role of the region as an important level of economic coordination. This class of stylized development concepts has emerged since the 1970s...

Regional innovation strategies rank at the top of public policy agendas today. There is a widespread consensus in both academic and policy circles that standardized “best practice” innovation policy models suffer from severe limitations and major shortcomings. The recent literature is replete with claims that regional innovation policies should be...

This report investigates ways and means to operationalize the S3 concept into a strategic Policy process. It makes the link between, on the one hand, research carried out in other parts of the SMARTSPEC project, focusing on the key components of the S3 concept, and, on the other hand, the Policy dimension of S3. Hence, it aims to investigate policy...

Metropolitan regions are often key centers of research, education and business services, and tend to have excellent preconditions for innovation and knowledge based sectors. They often have a highly qualified workforce and provide access to specialized resources and inputs for innovation. Consequently these centers are regarded to be important node...

Over the past two decades, cluster policies have become a standard instrument of public authorities and economic development practitioners in many parts of the world. This paper takes a critical stance on this phenomenon and provides theoretical arguments that challenge the widespread application of cluster initiatives to promote long-term regional...

Bevor wir verschiedene theoretische Vorstellungen darüber diskutieren, wie Regionalentwicklung abläuft und zu erklären ist, wollen wir in diesem Kapitel noch einige Grundlagen abhandeln. Es gilt, grundlegende Begriffe zu klären und fundamentale ökonomische Zusammenhänge in Erinnerung zu rufen. In den ersten beiden Abschnitten dieses Kapitels wird d...

Die in Kap. 5 dargestellte Polarisationstheorie und ihre Weiterentwicklungen zeigen zwei wesentliche Gemeinsamkeiten, nämlich 1. die Betonung zirkulär-kumulativer Prozesse, die, wenn einmal angestoßen, einen Entwicklungsprozess in eine bestimmte Richtung treiben, und 2. als Konsequenz davon die Möglichkeit divergierender Entwicklungsprozesse.

Innovationen gelten bereits seit den Arbeiten von Schumpeter als entscheidender Bestimmungsgrund von Wirtschaftswachstum, Beschäftigung und Wohlstand. Auch für die regionale Entwicklung werden seit langem sowohl die Entstehung als auch die Ausbreitung von Neuerungen als Motoren und damit auch als wesentliche Ursache für die unterschiedliche ökonomi...

Unter Regionalpolitik verstehen wir hier die Beeinussung wirtschaftlicher Prozesse in Teilräumen eines Staates oder eines größeren Wirtschaftsraumes durch die öffentliche Hand. Es soll dabei die durch den Markt erzeugte räumliche Allokation korrigiert werden. Nach dieser Definition ist Regionalpolitik identisch mit regionaler Wirtschaftspolitik, un...

Die neoklassische Theorie der Regionalentwicklung verwendet die grundlegenden Strukturen der neoklassischen ökonomischen Theorie und wendet sie auf die Fragen der Regionalentwicklung an. Sie fügt sich damit widerspruchsfrei in das umfassende Theoriegebäude der neoklassischen Ökonomik ein und erlaubt es uns damit auch, umfassendere theoretische Zusa...

Die hier dargestellten Ansätze untersuchen wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen und deren regionale Ausformung aus einer längerfristigen Perspektive. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass es von Zeit zu Zeit zu gravierenden Strukturveränderungen kommt, die sich in neuen Mustern räumlicher und regionaler Entwicklung niederschlagen. Diese Einbeziehung von Struktu...

Die Aussagen der neoklassischen Theorie, wie wir sie in Kap. 4 dargestellt haben, sind nie widerspruchslos akzeptiert worden. Vor allem zwei Punkte sind immer wieder auf Kritik gestoßen: 1. die der Neoklassik inhärente Tendenz zum Gleichgewicht und 2. ihre Implikation, dass Wirtschaftspolitik sich darauf beschränken sollte, die Funktionsfähigkeit d...