Regional innovation, clusters and networks

Interest in regional innovation has grown significantly over the past decade, driven both by advances in theoretical analysis and the growing interest in innovation as a source of regional competitive advantage, as well as by the necessity to develop new policies that would help nurture new industries, support emerging industrial clusters, make large metropolitan areas more sustainable, advance peripheral regions, connect regions and address regional inequalities and divergence. The main objective of this course is to expose students to the current debates related to regional innovation by providing an in-depth analysis of the regional innovation systems paradigm by exploring how these systems are structured, how knowledge and learning occurs within and between these systems, and how they can be resilient vis-à-vis a variety of challenges such as endogenous and exogenous shocks like the recent Covid pandemic.