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This ground-breaking book offers a coherent theoretical analysis of contemporary industrial knowledge flow dynamics. Furthermore, it advances wide-ranging and varied empirical findings from international comparative research which demonstrate that knowledge cross-pollination, often from industrially unrelated business sectors, is now commonplace in the economics of innovation. This, the authors argue, represents the rise of an externalized ‘matrix’ of knowledge flow dynamics among firms and industries. The book also examines related economic governance research that reveals the catalytic role that leading innovation policy agencies play in animating knowledge flow dynamics, particularly at the regional level. The chapters address various sectors including food and drink, biotechnology, ICT, new media, the automotive industry and tourism.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are spreading fast across Latin America and the Caribbean. This trend has brought about important economic and social changes, which have largely gone unmeasured until recently. Here, analysts from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean along with other distinguished scholars in the field of ICT, growth and productivity provide theoretical and empirical insights to the debate on the role of ICT in economic development.

Technological learning is a key driver behind the improvement of energy technologies and subsequent reduction of production costs. Understanding how and why production costs for energy technologies decline, and whether they will continue to do so in the future, is of crucial importance for policy makers, industrial stakeholders and scientists alike. This timely and informative book therefore provides a comprehensive review of technological development and cost reductions for renewable energy, clean fossil fuel and energy-efficient demand-side technologies.

Following the demise of the Washington Consensus, developing countries are looking for new ideas to guide their development. This innovative book suggests taking seriously some of the findings of evolutionary economics and paying specific attention to the institutions that matter for economic development, particularly those related to science, technology and innovation.

Promoting New Telecom Infrastructures examines how current telecom infrastructures are transforming from dedicated networks supporting either voice, data or broadcasting services to converged networks that support a wide variety of communication services, often denoted as Next Generation Networks (NGN). A current key challenge is therefore to define strategies, which can stimulate demand and investments in NGN in order to ensure development of adequate information infrastructures. With contributions from leading authorities in the field, this innovative book explores the three key themes related to this challenge and to strategies for the stimulation of demand and supply for NGN: strategies for expansion of broadband, pricing in NGN and development and pricing of mobile services.

This ground-breaking new volume evaluates the capacity of the triple helix model to represent the recent evolution of local and national systems of innovation. It analyses both the success of the triple helix as a descriptive and empirical model within internationally competitive technology regions as well as its potential as a prescriptive hypothesis for regional or national systems that wish to expand their innovation processes and industrial development. In addition, it examines the legal, economic, administrative, political and cognitive dimensions employed to configure and study, in practical terms, the series of phenomena contained in the triple helix category.

Beyond Intellectual Property explores the many means by which information is protected. Based on thorough empirical research in the US and Europe as well as practical experience of economic innovation, it goes far beyond the traditional realm of intellectual property. It also identifies the need for urgent reform of present arrangements and suggests practical ways of achieving this.

This book rigorously explores the critical, initial stage of cluster emergence in which the seeds for further growth are sown. Whether economic growth actually occurs, however, ultimately depends on various regional conditions and the processes in place.

This book addresses the foundations of economic growth at the firm level, combining both theoretical and econometric contributions by established scholars. Challenging contributions revisit Marshall’s view on the management of innovation, investigate the decision of firms to venture into entrepreneurship and clarify some misunderstanding about Schumpeter’s ideas. The book goes on to shed light on the classical specialisation-flexibility trade-off and provides a vision on the role of the knowledge-based economy and firm networks in technology development. Firm survival and performance, price-cost margins and the determinants of research intensity are also investigated econometrically.

After decades of liberalization of the telecommunications industry around the world and technological convergence that allows for increasing competition, sector-specific regulation of telecommunications has been on the decline. As a result, the telecommunications industry stands in the middle of a debate that calls for either a total deregulation of access to broadband infrastructures or a separation of infrastructure from service delivery. This book proposes new approaches to dealing with the current and future issues of regulation of telecommunication markets on both a regional and a global scale.