Innovation and Knowledge Links in Metropolitan Regions: The Case of Vienna

Constructing Regional Advantage in the Austrian ICT Sector—Towards Fine-Tuned Innovation Policies?

“…Source: Hollanders [12] While Vienna is well endowed with knowledge organizations and firms, innovation cooperations of companies have been reported to be rather low in a European comparison in earlier studies [10,17]. More recent research of the Vienna ICT sector, however, has shown considerable innovation networking at the regional level [19,22]. Also, the results of the present firm survey indicate that the ICT manufacturing companies in Vienna source knowledge quite frequently on the regional level (see Table 4).…”

“…For our analysis, we rely on institutional differences between three types of RIS: metropolitan regions (institutionally "thick" RIS), less urbanized regions (institutionally "thin" RIS), and industrialized regions ("networked" RIS) [18]. Metropolitan regions are generally regarded as centers of innovation that benefit from scale and agglomeration economies [19]. There is usually a high density of knowledge organizations and support institutions as well as a high density and diversity of firms and clusters.…”

“…In metropolitan regions, firms usually find superior prerequisites for innovation such as a highly qualified labor force, a high density of universities and knowledge organizations, knowledge intensive services as well as a well-developed transport and ICT infrastructure [16,19]. Such a setting of "institutional thickness" [1] provides for companies many opportunities to source knowledge locally and internationally and to engage in knowledge linkages with a variety of actors.…”

The Biotechnology Industry in the Prague Metropolitan Region: A Cluster within a Fragmented Innovation System?

“…The authors mentioned argue that, in regions already hosting knowledge-intensive industries, the development of biotechnology can be a spontaneous phenomenon. Nevertheless, in their later study (To« dtling and Trippl, 2009) these authorsöon the basis of detailed research of biotech and information and communication technology industries in Vienna ö arrived at a quite surprising conclusion: that the local biotech IS is no longer suffering from fragmentation and that a conscious policy effort played a positive role in boosting the interactions. On the other hand, in transformation regions the emergence of new activities, such as the biotech industry, is likely to take a different pathöfor instance, it could be more dependent on external distant knowledge sources (Mayer, 2005).…”

“…The aim of this paper is to address this research gap by adding new insights from the Prague metropolitan region with a fragmented emerging IS, set within the context of a postcommunist country. Our point of departure is a recent observation that Prague is a prime example of a fragmented metropolitan RIS (Blaz ek and Uhl|¨r , 2007), characterized by a strong endowment with knowledge and innovation infrastructure elements, yet suffering from all types of impediments to knowledge exchange as outlined by To« dtling and Trippl (2009)önamely, missing elements of RISs (ie missing innovation intermediaries and venture capital), a lack of local networking, and a lack of innovation culture. We focus on analysis of the spatial organization of interactions among Prague biotechnology firms to determine whether industry-specific elements are more important than the generally fragmented pattern of the emerging RIS in Prague.…”