13 - Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Who Is Forgotten?

Summary

Introduction

Innovation and entrepreneurship are the cornerstone of the modern economy, driving the creation of new economic opportunities. As a research area, it has gained traction among economic geographers as a spatially bounded phenomenon and regional event (see Chapters 9 and 16 in this volume). Processes of regional growth have shifted the attention from cost-based competitiveness to innovation-driven productivity (Feldman et al, 2012). The scholarly approach to understanding innovation has been also evolving from linear processes to ones that credit complexity and interactivity across a multiplicity of social actors and spatial scales (Cooke, 2001; Iammarino and McCann, 2015; Gong and Hassink, 2020). On the one hand, the highlight of Jacobian externalities on diversity, in terms of industry, population and cultures, shows the capacity of large metropolises to form new ideas and human capital spillovers (Neffke et al, 2011). Similarly, the massive positive externalities of R&D activities require economies of scale and spatial concentration to counteract the cost of technological spillover (Rodriguez-Pose, 2001). On the other hand, the innovation system approach attributes significance to innovationsupported institutions and regional innovation policy as the vital means through which competitiveness is attained (Cooke, 2001). Under such governance-based ontology as well as increasing attention to the role of nation state (Mayer et al, 2016; Fu and Lim, 2022), it could be postulated that the political economy of innovation favours cities with national and global influences and tends to marginalize the peripheral ones (see also Chapter 22 in this volume).

As a result, stylized facts and key evidence on regional innovation and entrepreneurship are heavily drawn upon a limited number of metropolitan centres, which celebrate the economies of externalities and knowledge spillovers underlying the non-linear processes of innovation. Since the late 2000s, scholars have been injecting incisive thinking into innovation studies by unravelling the unique ways innovation is nurtured, introduced and organized in peripheral regions (Doloreux and Dionne, 2008; Pugh, 2017; Fu and Lim, 2022). In the few innovation studies on peripheral regions, the definition of the periphery is manifold. Geographically speaking, the periphery includes regions and cities that have low population density and/ or are located beyond commuting distance of the primary metropolitan areas (Doloreux and Dionne, 2008). Todtling and Trippl (2005) differentiate peripheral regions from old industrial regions and metropolitan regions their lack of industrial clusters and support organizations.