Teemu Makkonen

Teemu Makkonen
University of Eastern Finland | UEF · Karelian Institute

PhD; Docent

About

108
Publications
37,018
Reads
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2,261
Citations
Introduction
Teemu Makkonen currently works at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. Teemu does research in Economic Geography.
Additional affiliations
December 2019 - present
University of Eastern Finland
Position
  • Professor
August 2018 - November 2019
University of Eastern Finland
Position
  • Research Director
June 2008 - June 2009
University of Turku
Position
  • Researcher

Publications

Publications (108)
Article
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European cross-border labour markets have remained weakly integrated. As a result, cross-border labour mobility is still a marginal phenomenon within the European Union. The b-solutions project has worked to improve this situation by suggesting solutions to remove legal and administrative obstacles of cross-border interaction. Here the results of b...
Article
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This study investigates whether local government expenditure correlate with the Quality of Life (QoL) of the local population and whether high public expenditure are indicative of high or low QoL. Data, including information on public expenditure and objective QoL indicators, were gathered for Finnish municipalities from several existing databases...
Conference Paper
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Finding innovative solutions for solving climate change is at the heart of contemporary policy debates. While it is easy to agree on the importance of tackling climate change, very little is known how regional policymakers can actually facilitate sustainable development via innovative solutions. The contemporary mission-oriented policy approaches d...
Article
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The concept of smart cities refers to urban areas that utilize (digital) technologies to enhance urban operations, services, and the quality of life of their residents. However, people have varying possibilities and capabilities for using (digital) technologies. This intertwines the technology-driven urban development with the ideal of inclusivenes...
Article
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The European Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) with its underlying aim to support regional growth, cohesion, and innovation has by now been widely applied to European Sparsely Populated Areas (SPAs). Previous works have identified that intra-regional stakeholder networks are important for a successful S3 implementation, and that their establishmen...
Article
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This paper explores possibilities for cross-fertilization between the mission-oriented approach (MOA), informing the European Union (EU) Missions, and Cohesion Policy (CP). It argues for mutual policy learning between CP and MOA to address their shortcomings: CP faces a gradual erosion of its identity, while MOA lacks a territorial perspective. MOA...
Article
Crowdsourced big data has faced growing criticism due to its quality issues, particularly selection biases. We propose an interpretive framework for understanding selection biases in crowdsourced big data applied to tourism research. Inspired by medical terminology, the framework was structured according to external manifestations, internal causes,...
Article
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Little is known about the geography of firm survival during COVID-19. We investigated the effect heterogeneity of the pandemic itself and of business support funding by the Finnish government with respect to rural and urban business closures. To do so, we utilised regional data on firm survival, detailed business support funding data and a rural-ur...
Article
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There is an evident research gap in the literature on the geography of innovation: very little is known about the innovation activities of rural enterprises in times of crisis. The topic is addressed here by analysing space-time differences in the receipt of research, development and innovation (RDI) funding by Finnish firms before and during the C...
Article
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Available online xxxx Associate editor: Stoffelen Arie The literature on cross-border regional innovation systems suggests that facilitating cross-border interaction and knowledge flows promotes the innovativeness of border regions. Tourism can heighten the interaction and knowledge flows between populations, businesses, and other organisations on...
Article
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This paper explores the role and significance of spatial units in online tourism marketing and branding. The analysis is based on the application of different regional typologies as categorization units in understanding and analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of tourism websites. The study combines four distinct ways of classifying re...
Article
Food attracts a large number of foodie tourists to travel together. Although previous research has discussed food tourism mainly from the point of view of customer satisfaction, there is still an evident gap in our knowledge about the travel behavior of foodie tourists and the influences of their travel partners on travel patterns. This paper uses...
Article
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The Tour de France (TdF) is one of the biggest and most recognized annual sporting events in the world. Cities and regions participate actively by hosting a stage start and/or finish, but it is unclear if there are place-based benefits from such local engagements. We estimate the direct and spatially indirect immediate regional benefits of hosting...
Article
This article studies the development of scientific co-publications between EU countries and Russia since the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. We investigate if economic sanctions and counter-sanctions imposed during the crisis affected EU-Russia knowledge flows even before all science collaborations between the EU countries and Russia were even...
Article
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Analyzing tourists' travel behavior at different stages of a trip can help to better understand their travel demands, providing valuable suggestions for destination management. In this article, we propose a research framework that can help in comprehensively analyzing tourists' travel behavior from the perspective of the three main stages: before,...
Article
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This paper explores avenues for cross-fertilisation between the mission-oriented approach and Cohesion Policy. It argues in favor of mutual policy learning between the two to address some of their respective shortcomings: Cohesion Policy is facing a gradual erosion of its identity, whereas the mission-oriented approach needs a stronger territorial...
Article
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This paper explores how microbreweries are engaged within the local communities they serve. It investigates whether the relationship between microbreweries and their home localities is driven by microbreweries' senses of place and belonging or by market-driven rationales instrumentally promoted through territorial branding strategies. Drawing from...
Article
This paper explores the connection between environmental innovations, geographically mediated knowledge spillovers (geographical spillovers), economic and environmental performance. Specifically, with data gathered from the OECD database for three economic areas (Europe, Japan and USA) over the period 2005-2017 the paper focuses on measuring the re...
Article
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Urban parks are among the most important urban public services. Quantifying their visitation intensity and understanding the driving forces behind their popularity is of great relevance to urban planning. We analyze the behavior of park visitors in Beijing based on phenological information extracted from social media data. Specifically, we built a...
Article
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It is commonly stated that a large share of Finnish regions are shrinking in terms of their population and local economy, which naturally poses challenges for balanced regional development. However, and rather surprisingly, there has been relatively little methodological discussion in Finland on the measurement of shrinkage: how to determine whethe...
Chapter
Borders create both barriers but also opportunities for tourism. One important pull factor for tourists crossing the border is shopping. For cross-border shopping to become a major attraction for tourism, the border to be crossed needs to permeable enough, regulations (visa requirements, customs, etc.) need to favour cross-border shopping, the loca...
Article
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Depopulation, commonly labelled as shrinkage, of rural areas can lead to a self-reinforcing vicious cycle of decreased regional vitality. However, some regions have been able to adapt to shrinkage and maintain their vitality despite the population loss. Thus, they have been able to “shrink smart”. While there is a growing interest in this topic and...
Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent public health restrictions led to a significant slump in economic activities around the globe. This slump has been met by various policy actions to cushion the detrimental socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis and eventually bring the economy back on track. We provide an ex-ante evaluation of the ef...
Article
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Originality is an important goal of research. However, relatively little is known about the characteristics and motivations of individual researchers or about the facilitating or hindering factors that, in combination, can lead to original research outputs. This is a gap this study aims to fill. Interviews with 20 highly original academics (identif...
Article
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The growing interest in addressing societal challenges is changing research and innovation policy dynamics. However, a challenge-oriented approach requires specific public sector capacities to coordinate and provide directionality, while having an innovation ecosystem with sufficient scientific and technological capabilities to address the grand so...
Article
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In this article, we contribute to recent debates on the geographies of discontent by examining the implications of urbanisation on the state as a territorial-political community in the European context. Building on an Arendtian conception of politics, we argue that the emergence of the 'urban' as a dominant spatio-political imaginary has led to a n...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to create a research framework to scrutinize how individuals' digital technology use produces tangible and intangible outcomes in online (digital) and offline realms. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies the Bourdieusian e-capital perspective to create a theory-based framework. The framework was used t...
Article
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We investigate whether research and development (R&D) and environmental knowledge spillovers aid economies in meeting the targets of the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG12). We do so by utilizing panel data from the European Union, Japan, and USA over the per...
Article
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Purpose It is commonly stated that increased board diversity leads to the heightened financial performance of firms via the impact that it can have on innovation, but the latter association has, thus far, remained empirically controversial. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this unresolved debate and gap in the literature via studying diffe...
Article
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Cycling tourism has grown in popularity worldwide, motivating its inclusion in the development strategies of tourism organizations. This paper builds an analysis model based on spatial analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition, providing a data-driven way to utilize GPS cycling trajectory data to analyze the spatiotemporal behavior of Chinese cycli...
Article
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International boundaries have been mainly considered as barriers in literature on the 'cross-border regional innovation system' (CBRIS), in line with their traditional understanding. In this paper, we underline that such a perspective presents limits, and argue in favour of an understanding of multidimensional borders that are subject to dynamic ch...
Chapter
Structural changes have been transforming rural regions from mere sites of primary resource extraction and related production towards more diversified entrepreneurial environments. This transformation resonates with the questions set in the literature on rural entrepreneurship: what are the locational choices for founding enterprises in rural regio...
Book
Enterprises located in rural regions face various challenges in the globalised and digitised world. This book offers comprehensive answers to the question of what makes up the rural enterprise economy in the contemporary business world. It addresses the competitiveness and viability, strategic management and strategic change, and marketing issues f...
Chapter
This concluding chapter summarises the key lessons learnt about the ‘rural enterprise economy’ and provides avenues for future research. In addition, it presents important implications for policy-makers and practitioners committed to rural economic development and rural enterprises.
Article
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Whereas interregional networks of individual actors have recently received growing attention, networks in terms of collective regional groups of organisations interacting with their counterparts remain largely ignored. This is surprising given the Smart Specialisation agenda's ‘outward looking’ approach. This conceptual paper explores the rationale...
Preprint
Full-text available
Originality is an important goal of research. However, relatively little is known about the characteristics and motivations of individual researchers or about the facilitating or hindering factors that, in combination, can lead to original research outputs; a gap this study aims to fill. Interviews with twenty highly original academics (identified...
Article
Full-text available
In Finland, there has been a strong tendency to direct rural development from competitiveness and (traditional) enterprise and industrial policy towards a more holistic, systemic and place-based “vitality policy” including softer development values related to attractive living environments, communality and the well-being of residents. Research on t...
Article
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This paper investigates the relationship between innovation and employment by analyzing the factors that drive job creation processes and particularly by scrutinizing the role of innovation on the skill structure of regional labor demand. The study utilizes Finnish regional innovation (proxied with R&D expenditures) and employment data for 2000–201...
Article
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For a long time, the measurement of innovation has been at the forefront of policymakers' and researchers' agenda worldwide. Therefore, there is an ongoing debate about which indicators should be used to measure innovation. Recent approaches have favoured the use of composite innovation indicators. The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) is a rele...
Article
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Open Innovation Platforms (OIPs) have been described as a new generation of co-creation spaces that enable the different actors of the innovation ecosystem to interact with each other and to facilitate user-driven innovation. Here the utility of OIPs was scrutinized with two case study examples: one from South Korea and one from Finland. In the two...
Article
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The research on innovation in the maritime sector has commonly focused on the implementation of innovation rather than on more complex issues such as the interplay between technological aspects, market conditions, and, particularly, regulatory regimes in shaping the emergence and growth of global systems involved with the development, production, a...
Article
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This paper builds on the idea of cross-border regional innovation system (CBRIS) to investigate the implications of global and regional changes in social, political, economic, and ecological systems on cross-border regions. In an era of increasingly abrupt changes in border permeability, CBRIS offers an intriguing context for studying such processe...
Article
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Geo-located travel blogs, a new data source, enable to achieve more detailed analysis of tourists' spatio-temporal behavior. Taking Chinese tourists in Nordic countries as the research object, this paper focuses on their behavior, seasonal patterns and complex network effects by using geo-located travel blog data collected from Qunar.com. The resul...
Article
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In light of the shortcomings concerning cross-border regional innovation systems (CBRIS), this analysis seeks to propose a new cross-border regional innovation ecosystem (CBRIE) concept better equipped to address the contemporary innovation policy development and practical regional policy challenges on the ground. The existing literature on CBRIS h...
Article
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The present paper explores the unresolved issue in regional planning of whether small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit from being located in border regions in terms of cross-border cooperation opportunities and cross-border externalities. By systematically reviewing the existing literature on the topic with the help of a mapping review,...
Article
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Ensuring sustainable transition from more to less polluting technologies has become an area of increasing interest to academics and policymakers alike over the recent years. Environmental innovations play a key role in this transition. Still, to date relatively little empirical research has been undertaken on the topic. This applies particularly to...
Article
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In spite of our current understanding of Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) design and implementation, an understanding of interrelated governance practices aimed at addressing S3 governance issues is lacking. Applying a data-triangulation approach to a large peripheral Finnish region (Lapland), the analysis suggests that S3 implementation faces tw...
Article
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This work studies the linkages between spatially bound knowledge spillovers, internal research, and innovation (R&I) activities and firm productivity. Spillovers are modeled to emanate from intra- and extra-sectoral R&I activities in the firms’ regional business environments. We specifically test for non-linearities in the complex relationship betw...
Article
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Highlights - The editorial introduces the special issue on “innovation in peripheries and borderlands”. - Innovation takes place also outside of cities. - Peripherality can be a positive advantage to certain types of innovation.
Article
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Spatial patterns of tourist flows represent the movement of tourists and show differences in tourism resources giving advice for promoting balanced and sustainable tourism development. This paper proposes a novel framework for analyzing these patterns based on tourists' digital footprint data collected from online travel diaries. Based on illustrat...
Article
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Smart destinations have become an esteemed concept among researchers and policy makers. Discussion of the concept is optimistic in tone and commonly linked to information rather than knowledge and more to design than innovation. This partly explains the relatively limited critical discussion of the (potential) benefits of smart destinations. The ar...
Article
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This paper studies cross-border cooperation at the US-Canadian Cascadia region by implementing an in-depth analysis to examine the role of cognitive proximity as a proxy for favourable conditions for cross-border economic interaction (measured as co-publications, co-patents and networking). The analysis deploys primary and secondary data sources an...
Article
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This paper analyses the determinants of interregional innovation cooperation in European knowledge networks. Our main goal is to assess whether structural heterogeneity in the context of the "urban-rural dichotomy" and international borders can explain differences in the regions' engagement in interregional innovation cooperation. We estimate a gra...
Article
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Few studies have researched how the linkages of tourist firms are related to the types of tourism innovation. Therefore, an organizational information processing theory perspective, a case study approach, and a focus group method were adopted in the Pearl River Delta area (China) to discover how different types of firm linkages influence tourism in...
Article
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We apply panel econometrics to assess the causal linkages between education, research and innovation (R&I) and economic development for EU-28 countries over the time period 1998–2013. Since this period coincides with the biggest enlargement wave in the EU’s history, we particularly aim at identifying the degree of heterogeneity in this nexus betwee...
Article
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Originality is an essential element of academic research and the peer review system plays a key gatekeeping role in its acceptance. However, there is no consensus as to the precise definition of the concept, its measurement nor the importance attached to it. Primary data from 26 interviews with editors or editorial board members of top ranking tour...
Research
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SPATIA Raportteja 1/2019. Tämän Itä-Suomen yliopiston Alue- ja kuntatutkimuskeskus Spatian toteuttaman tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on kartoittaa Pohjois-Karjalan kuntien edellytyksiä edistää elinvoimaa ja elinkeinopolitiikkaa. Tutkimus on osa laajempaa Puhti – muuttuvat yritystoiminnan muodot Pohjois-Karjalan maaseudulla -hanketta. Hanketta rahoiteta...
Article
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In this article the distribution and intensity of cross-border cooperation (CBC) networks are tested with primary survey and interview data collected from the Finnish–Russian cross-border region. The study concentrates on the cross-border connectivity of three regionally significant and interlocking sectors (forest, mining and tourism industries to...
Article
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Given the sheer number of cross-border regions (CBRs) within the EU, their socio-economic importance has been recognized both by policy-makers and academics. Recently, the novel concept of cross-border regional innovation system has been introduced to guide the assessment of integration processes in CBRs. A central focus of this concept is set on a...
Article
The maturing literature on innovation has recognized the processes of sectoral and technological systems of innovation as helpful frameworks to analyze environmental innovation – a field whose importance continues to grow amidst contemporary regulatory pressures, for example, on maritime industry and shipping. This paper intertwines these key innov...
Article
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Purpose This paper aims to assess the often repeated, but empirically unconfirmed, supposition that there is a positive connection between foreign board members (FBMs) and firm innovativeness and to set a research agenda for future studies on the topic. Design/methodology/approach The analyses are based on a large sample of firms within the Europe...
Article
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Knowledge transfer and innovation cooperation between the EU and its neighbours has remained weakly developed. To promote this cooperation, the EU has set up initiatives for the European neighbourhood. The issue has, however, received very limited scholarly attention in the field of tourism. This research gap is addressed here via interview data co...
Article
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This study analyses electronic service (e-service) adoption in regards to socio-spatial dynamics. Conceptually the paper focuses on the interrelations of both private and public e-services and on the influence that demographic variables have on e-service adoption. To empirically engage in this discussion the study uses segmented residential areas r...
Article
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Cross-border innovation cooperation (CBIC) has been heralded as one of the corner stones of innovation-driven growth opportunities for firms located in cross-border regions (CBRs). The success of this cooperation is affected by varying types of proximities identified in the literature as geographical, institutional, cultural, cognitive, technologic...
Article
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Innovation has long been considered one of the key engines of economic growth, and patents as important incentives for research and development activity. Particularly in terms of intellectual property rights (IPR), however, little is known about how cities contribute to regional innovation: are they containers, facilitators or innovators? This is i...
Article
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The importance of inter-regional co-operation and innovation are widely accepted in the development rhetoric of the European Union. The highlighted importance of both themes in the context of borderlands has recently led to the coining of a new concept, cross-border regional innovation system. However, little attention has been given to the empiric...
Chapter
Finding a suitable partner is paramount for the success of innovation cooperation. Thus, this paper sets out to analyse the determinants of cross-border innovation cooperation in Denmark by focusing on partner selection. The aim of the article is to investigate determinants of partner selection by taking the location of the partners into account. I...
Article
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This paper explores the collaboration networks of Finnish metal music genre superstars, the evolution of these networks through time and the importance of geographical scale in their evolution. The article, therefore, aims to shed light upon how successful creative teams network: locally (local buzz) and/or globally (global pipelines). The contempo...
Article
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The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the implications of the European Commission’s smart specialisation agenda in a specific, cross-border context. The paper critically reflects on some of the RIS3 (research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation) agenda’s premises by illustrating its practical implementation in the Upper R...
Article
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Knowledge-based urban development (KBUD) has recently emerged as a central topic of discussion among scholars and practitioners interested in urban development tools and policies. However, what has rarely been discussed before is whether KBUD can be achieved in a cross-border context. This paper sets out to propose an analytical framework for empir...
Article
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This article addresses the economic impact that cross-border shopping has on the local tourism industry and the ways that cross-border shopping is taken advantage of in tourism destination marketing. Southern Jutland – situated in Denmark just north of the German border, where border shops situated just south of the same border enable Danes to capi...
Chapter
Earlier quantitative studies on cross-border regional integration processes have commonly neglected Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) indicators: even the most notable example of a composite indicator approach to measuring cross-border regional integration, i.e. the Oresund index, lacks a sub-category for STI. Consequently, by ignoring cros...
Article
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The contemporary conditions of academic capitalism exert pressures on researchers to avoid ‘peripheral’ journals and ‘unfashionable’ topics. This paper sheds a light onto the structure of one such ‘offbeat’ field, namely ‘border region studies’, by discussing its geographical distribution, key themes, significance and impact. The review suggests th...
Article
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The concept of cross-border regional innovation systems (CBRIS) surfaced in the literature on economic geography through discourses that highlighted the need for broadening innovation systems to cross-border contexts. Since these early discussions, the theoretical backgrounds of CBRIS have been elaborated through notions of geographical scale, prox...
Article
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This paper provides new insights on the effects of the enlargement of the European Union (EU) and European integration by investigating the issue of scientific collaboration within the new EU member states vis-à-vis the old EU member states. The question addressed is whether the EU membership following the two enlargement waves 2004 and 2007 has si...
Article
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Maritime transport is facing wide-ranking challenges due to stricter environmental regulations. It has been positioned that these stricter environmental regulations will significantly hamper the competitiveness of the shipping industry and other export/import oriented industries. However, contrasting views, arguing that environmental regulations wi...