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On the Governance of Regional Innovation Systems

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ON THE GOVERNANCE OF REGIONAL INNOVATION SYSTEMS CASE STUDIES FROM FOUR CITY-REGIONS WITHIN THE GERMAN FEDERAL STATE OF NORTH RHINE-WESTPHALIA: AACHEN, DORTMUND, DUISBURG AND DÜSSELDORF by CARSTEN SCHIERENBECK A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Commerce and Social Science of The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Centre for Urban and Regional Studies Birmingham Business School The University of Birmingham April 2009 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the governance of so-called regional innovation systems. It studies regional and sub-regional dynamics in building institutional environments conducive to innovation. The research employs a qualitative research methodology that comprises semi- structured interviews with 47 policy-makers, practitioners and academics in four case studies of city-regions within the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia: Aachen, Dortmund, Duisburg and Düsseldorf. It identifies factors influencing the systemic-ness of business and innovation support, particularly within the triple helix of university-industry-government relations. It argues that important sub-regional governance dynamics are neglected by many contemporary regional conceptualisations and proposes considering local innovation systems as an alternative. Hence, it scrutinises the appropriateness of the current academic conceptualisations and, in particular, criticises their value in terms of operational guidance. The thesis argues that certain regional innovation policies and governance dynamics fail to constitute a regional innovation system and calls for organisational innovation in the framework structure to revive or maintain inter-institutional dynamics and cooperative relationships towards achieving a coherent, holistic and strategic policy approach. This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of how to make a regional innovation system work and what important aspects are to be considered for implementing innovation policy – including cluster policy – successfully. i Key words: regional innovation systems; cluster; networks; innovation policy; technology policy; cluster policy; industrial policy; economic development policy; business support organisations; institutions; governance; government; industry; university; academia; triple helix; systemic-ness; cooperation; region; city-region; city; Germany; North Rhine- Westphalia; Aachen; Dortmund, Duisburg; Düsseldorf Subject/JEL Codes: B52; D7; L3; L53; O18; R58; Y4; Z13; see http://econpapers.repec.org/scripts/jelsearch.pl and http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/WoPEc/data/JEL ii PREFACE Why do some industries continue their successful legacies, while others fail and decline over time? Why do some industries relocate, leaving their regions of origin struggling with structural change? And what can be done to address this? These questions of economic change and development have fascinated me for a long time, and have accompanied me during my studies of business administration and economics at the Universities of Wuppertal and Birmingham. I greatly enjoyed lectures on production economics and strategic management, which influenced the choice of my MBA dissertation project (Schierenbeck, 1999) at the Birmingham Business School. I used Michael Porter’s popular diamond models to investigate the competitive advantage of the New Town Telford in the West Midlands and it is thus not surprising that cluster policies and building regional innovation systems are at the core of this thesis. Acknowledgements During the work on my MBA thesis, I established links with the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) of the School of Public Policy, based also at the University of Birmingham. I was fortunate enough to receive the CURS European Research Studentship in support of my Doctoral Research, which comprised a year’s placement at West Midlands in Europe in Brussels. I would like to thank the University of Birmingham for the indispensable financial support I have received from the PhD scholarship and for the great opportunity the university provided with this interesting integrated placement. The year in Brussels fuelled an already keen interest in EU affairs and influenced the direction of this research. The placement provided a great source of information and contacts and enabled me to bring a European perspective to my research. Furthermore, it contributed to the thesis’ focus on innovation. Inasmuch, I am very thankful to the staff at West Midlands in Europe, and in iii particular to Ms Glynis Whiting, the head of the office, for entrusting me with the responsibility for the Innovation Policy Portfolio during the year. The realisation of this research project would not have been possible without the precious support of a number of people at CURS. First of all, I am especially grateful for the invaluable conversations and extremely enduring guiding assistance of my supervisor, Gill Bentley, who even gave up Christmas Day on the final stretch to enable me to complete the thesis on time. For all the helpful comments and recommendations from my research panel and staff, I would like to thank Dr. Stewart MacNeill, Dr. John Gibney, Dr. Margareta Dahlström, Chris Watson, Dr. Alex Burfitt, Chris Collinge and Dr. Alan Srbljanin. In addition, I wish to thank the CURS staff, Ms Sue Truman, Ms Jane Simpson and Mr. William (Bill) Firth, for their readiness to help and their administrative and technical support. I am very appreciative for the opportunity I had at CURS to gain some practical experience as a Teaching Assistant with a series of lectures in 2003 on EU Regional Policy for the MSc (Economic Development Policy) course as well as to participate in a number of interesting research and consultancy projects (Burfitt, Gibney, MacNeill, & Schierenbeck, 2003; Burfitt, Gibney, & Schierenbeck, 2002; Collinge & Schierenbeck, 2004; MacNeill et al., 2003; MacNeill, Burfitt, Ferrari, & Schierenbeck, 2004; Schierenbeck & Bentley, 2002; Schierenbeck, MacNeill, & Bentley, 2004). Not only were these welcomed distractions from my PhD but they also enabled me to work with and learn from the experienced staff at CURS. I am also very grateful for the constructive comments from Professor David Charles, which have helped greatly in focussing the thesis. iv Although I have not made use here of the results of research into German data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), I am thankful for the hospitality of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany, which allowed me to occupy their guest facilities for a week in 2003 to investigate the data. In particular, I would like to thank Norbert Janz and Dr. Georg Licht for giving me this opportunity and great thanks belong to Sandra Gottschalk for her assistance and valuable comments. A special thanks is extended to all those policy-makers, practitioners and academics who agreed to be interviewed for the thesis. It is only because of their willingness to sacrifice their precious time and to retrieve information that the thesis was possible. Furthermore, I would like to express thanks to Ms Claudia Schneider and Ms Corinna Wolfgarten for their help with transcribing tape recordings. Finally, I want to thank my partner, my parents, my relatives and my friends for their understanding, moral support and acceptance of my social hibernation during the course of the writing-up process. Thanks to my fellow research friends - Wing (Dr. Lam), Richard (Dr. Conlin), and Mark (Dr. Smith) – to whom I am very grateful for their continuous encouragement and helpful advice. Thanks to Ria and Stefan Dr. Frank, who were there for me when I needed them and who took a constant interest in my progress. Thanks to Pat and Torsten, for their ongoing support. Thanks to my mother and father for their eternal love and support, without which I would have not been able to complete this study. Thanks especially to Nadia, for all your love, support and care over the years. I will always remember. v A final note to the reader I am very grateful for the financial support that I received from the University of Birmingham for this present study as well as by the Darlehenskasse der Studentenwerke im Land NRW e.V. (DAKA) for my previous studies. Nevertheless, this research remained fully independent. No funding that I have received for my studies or parallel publications was in any way linked to restrictions towards the topic or content. I made every effort to list all references but apologise for a few cases where this was not fully possible. I owe thanks to the work of my fellow academics, who provided inspiration to my work. Concerning the style of this thesis, the author has sought advice in cases of uncertainty from the very useful MHRA Style Guide (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2002), which the author want to recommend to other research students. 1 I have provided a more detailed page numbering to references than normally found in the Harvard,
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