Regional Innovation Support Systems and Technopoles - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 48

Table 1 Typology of regional innovation support systems

Grassroots Network Dirigiste

Initiation local multi-level central government

Funding local agencies diverse national agencies

Research & support applied/near-market mixed basic

Specialisation low mixed high

Intra-regional
co-operation

high fair low

Co-ordination low potentially high potentially high, but often low

Source adapted by the authors after Cooke 2004

learning through an institutional milieu characterised by embeddedness''. The aim
of regional innovation systems is to integrate traditional, context-linked, regional
knowledge and codified, world-wide available knowledge in order to stimulate
regional endogenous potentials.
A typology of regional innovation support systems helps to apply the concept to
a broad range of regions and to clarify the 'scale' of involvement of public policy,
which is from mainly national to mainly local. It also clarifies the relationship
between national and regional innovation support systems. Such a typology con-
sists of grassroots systems, network systems and dirigiste systems (Table 1 ) (for
other typologies in relation to regional innovation policies see Cooke 2007 ;
Nauwelaers and Wintjes 2003 ).
In grassroot systems, the initiation of technology transfer action is locally
organised—for instance, at district or town level. Funding is supplied by local
banking, local government, and local chamber of commerce. The competence of
the research and support agencies of the region focuses on near-market and highly
applied fields. However, the technical specialisation is likely to be low, thus it has
the tendency to concentrate on general problem-solving. The level of supralocal
co-ordination is low, because the nature of initiation is local-based.
In network systems, the initiation includes local, regional, federal and supra-
national levels. Moreover, the competence of research and support is multilevel,
since funding is supplied by agreement between banks, government agencies and
firms. In the research subsystem, a mixture of basic and high applied research is
more likely. The co-ordination efforts between institutions of different spatial
levels are potentially high, because there are many stakeholders involved. In this
type of system, specialisation is mixed, which is due to a wide range of demand,
going SMEs to multinationals (Cooke 2004 ).
These two systems show similarities to what Amin ( 1999 ) has labelled bottom-

up, region-specific, longer term and plural-actor kind of regional economic

development policies.
In nationally initiated dirigiste systems, on the other hand, intraregional insti-
tutional embeddedness and ''systemness'' tend to be weaker. They come close to
the firm-centred, incentive-based, state-driven and standardised kind of regional