Identifying regional innovation policy options from an evolutionary perspective

Abstract:

A promising topic in Geography of Innovation is to develop and apply a systemic perspective on policy change to explain new growth paths in regions (Boschma 2026; Boschma and Frenken 2026). The paper is inspired by the policy mix literature (Howlett and Rayner 2007; OECD 2010; Uyarra 2010; Flanagan et al. 2011; Howlett et al. 2017; Bessa and Gouveia 2022) that argues that policies are not developed in isolation but in a context of pre-existing policies. Research on policy mixes has adopted case study approaches, which implies there is little comparative work to date. There is also a tendency to follow a functional, normative approach in which the ‘right’ set of policies are predefined, instead of following an approach in which revealed policy mixes made in practice are being examined.

We set out how complementarities across policies may affect diversification processes in regions, how such a policy complementarity framework may shed new light on the question what is possible, and what is not, when implementing in policies in specific territorial contexts, and how this framework may contribute to a better understanding of how policy may, or may not, become effective in particular institutional and policy contexts (Boschma 2025). We propose new methodology to do comparative analysis across territories (Mealy et al. 2025). We present a quantitative measure of revealed policy relatedness that can identify which policies are proximate and which are not, and what are the opportunity sets of regions to implement policy change to induce place transformation. Our aim is to apply this evolutionary framework to regional innovation policies that have been implemented in European regions in the last decade.

About the Speaker:

Ron Boschma is full professor in Regional Economics at Utrecht University, and Professor 2 at UiS Business School of Stavanger University. Boschma has been full professor in Innovation Studies at Lund University where he was also director of the Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE). He is member of the Executive Board of the International Regional Studies Association since 2015. Boschma has published on Evolutionary Economic Geography, the spatial evolution of industries, geography of innovation, regional resilience, regional diversification, and Smart Specialization policy. Boschma has been ranked by Thomson Reuters among the top 1% of cited researchers worldwide in all scientific fields every year since 2014. In 2024, he received the prestigious Vautrin Lud prize for his scientific achievements, considered the ‘Nobel of Geography’, the highest international award in the field of geography.

Ron Boschma is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Evolutionary Economic Geography, an influential stream in the field of economic geography that builds on evolutionary principles derived from evolutionary economics and biology. He has done pioneering work on the theoretical foundations of EEG (see e.g. Boschma and Lambooy 1999; Boschma and Frenken 2006) and the development of key conceptual building blocks in EEG like proximity (Boschma 2005), related variety (Boschma and Iammarino 2009) and relatedness (Boschma 2017).

His most influential paper was published in Regional Studies in 2005 on the notion of proximity, building on the French school of proximity. In that paper, he proposed a clear distinction between different forms of proximity that need to be disentangled in empirical work om proximity and innovation.