Name and affiliations of the session organisers
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Jose Hervas-Oliver (Universitat Politècnica de València)
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Rolf Sternberg (Leibniz University Hannover)
The session’s theme addresses the STI/DUI framework developed by Jensen et al. (2007) in its application to firm innovation in national, regional and local innovation systems. While it is widely accepted that R&D-driven STI innovations do not fully capture the innovation in the vast majority of firms (and the SMEs in particular), most of the governments’ innovation policies are stilled biased towards an STI-like understanding of innovation processes and innovative products.
This is also true for the measurement of innovations by researchers who quite often – due to significantly improved data access – simply use patent data and indicators although the latter refers to R&D based innovations only (if at all: most patents never end up in new innovations in the sense of new products!). Among SMEs, representing the large majority of all enterprises, non-R&D based innovations in the sense of the DUI mode of innovation are much more frequent than STI innovations.
Consequently, our session welcomes contributions that address this research gap in terms of conceptual and/or empirical research on DUI innovations, perceived from a spatial perspective. The main objectives are:
We therefore invite contributions to the following topics (among others):