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Innovation in small regions

This special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography on ‘Innovation in small regions’ is intended to contribute to the increasing body of research and knowledge on innovation activity in regions outside major metropolitan regions and leading clusters. While such regions are termed small in this special issue, a theoretically more substantial way of describing such regions in the literature has been to argue that they are organizationally thin (Tödtling & Trippl 2005; Isaksen 2014). The thinness consists in the fact that the regions have few or only low-profile universities and research organizations, no or weak industrial clusters, and a lack of highly educated workers (Tödtling & Trippl 2005). The organizational thinness may result in a low level of research and development (R&D) and product innovation, with firms predominantly concentrating on incremental process innovations. While such arguments have both an intuitive appeal and certainly can be backed by empirical studies in a number of regions, we argue that one size does not fit all, even in the periphery. Each of the articles presented here documents, based on highly different approaches and methodologies, a variety of innovative activities in small regions. Most of the articles in this special issue first appeared at sessions organized by the Norwegian Geography Network on Regional Development and Economic Geography at the Nordic Geographers Meeting in Reykjavik in June 2013. Both the network and the conference sessions aimed to encourage research on innovation in small regions. This was motivated by a wish to fill the gap between the level of research and knowledge on metropolitan areas and successful clusters and that on small regions. To some extent, concepts and theories developed in studies of dynamic core regions are also used to investigate industrial development and innovation processes in small and organizationally thin regions. Often-used mechanisms for industrial development in core regions are local knowledge spillover through labour market mobility, academia–industry collaboration, the formation of new firms through regional branching, and ‘buzz’. Such mechanisms are probably not particularly relevant for understanding industrial development and innovation activity in small regions where, for example, there is little local knowledge spillover due to a limited number of actors with related competence. The ‘core region thinking’ has also inspired the development of some well-known and much-used strategies for industrial development, such as regional cluster policies, that focus on local knowledge flow and the creation of common production factors for similar and related firms, but this is less relevant in small regions. Thus, we see a need for theoretical and empirical studies of innovation activity in small regions in order to increase our understanding of the particular innovation processes in such regions and to improve policy strategies targeted at small regions. The five articles in this issue contribute to better understanding of different aspects of innovation in small regions. In the first article, Jan Ženka, Josef Novotný, Ondřej Slach & Viktor Květoň study industrial specialization and economic performance in small regions in Czechia. They use a dataset from 2009 containing data on 203 regions with less than 200,000 inhabitants. The reported findings indicate that economic diversity does not have a direct impact on economic performance. A distinction between small regions with high employment in manufacturing industry and those with a much lower share of employment in manufacturing is introduced. The former group of small regions benefits from specialization, while the latter group benefits from diversity. These are interesting results in light of the ongoing debates on related variety, path dependence, and regional development in general. Stig-Erik Jakobsen & Torbjørn Lorentzen investigate innovation collaboration between firms in Norwegian regions, based on data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS). They find comprehensive regional differences; collaboration is more frequent among enterprises in small towns and rural areas than metropolitan regions. The results of a logistic regression analysis indicates that the location of a firm has a significant effect on its likelihood to participate in innovation collaboration, and confirm that firms located in rural areas collaborate more than firms in metropolitan regions. Firms in rural areas are more inclined to collaborate outside their industry sector and outside their regions compared to firms in more central regions. Such linkages represent bridges to new knowledge. Mona Hedfeldt & Mats Lundmark study the role of inmigrants in the formation of new firms in the Bergslagen region in Sweden. Bergslagen is an old industrial region and inmigration is proposed as a source of tapping into the outer world. In-migration is expected to stimulate knowledge spillover much in the same way as labour mobility does in more dynamic regions. Empirically, the authors find that in-migrants were more inclined to start new firms, and they examine the socio-demographic characteristics of self-employed in-migrants. Their study is based on longitudinal georeferenced data covering the period 1993‒2008. Hedfeldt & Lundmark conclude that the estimated models show that both in-migration and return migration have a positive and significant effect on the decision to start a business. The point of departure for the study by Bjørn-Tore Flåten, Arne Isaksen & James Karlsen was two manufacturing firms in a small region in southern Norway. They investigated the mechanisms contributing to the firms’ competitiveness and Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2015 Vol. 69, No. 2, 65–66, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2015.1011685