Our coffee breaks with researchers aim to
spread knowledge about regional
development and innovation. By sending a
camera around the world, we present you
with different angles and insights on
the topic. We ask researchers directly
and in a personal manner about their
work. We want to make scientific
knowledge accessible to all. Hi welcome to
coffee break with researchers, today
we're in Florence at the Regional 
Innovation Policies Conference and I'm
having a coffee break with Jiří Blažek, he's an associate professor at Charles
University in Prague. Thank you for
joining me at this coffee break in a
conference, how are you doing? I'm
fine, thank you very much for this kind invitation, thanks a lot.
we are very happy to have you
here, I want to talk with you about a
recent paper you wrote, in which you
analyze the relationships among
knowledge bases, R&D structure and
innovation performance of European
regions, could you please tell me what
the paper was about? sure the name is
the name of the paper is
quite complicated but in fact the idea was quite
straightforward I simply try to look
what is the relationship between the
basic two subsystems of innovation
systems in the regions, which means
knowledge generation, subsystem basically
public research and knowledge
exploitations of system, basically
private research and I was actually puzzled on how
this is related to the concept of
knowledge bases. Okay thank you for that, so I see that one of the key notion of
your paper is the notion of
differentiated knowledge bases, could you
please tell me what this is about?
Actually the concept of knowledge bases
was introduced by Björn Asheim and Meric Gertler and the basic
idea is that the nature of innovation
process differs substantially in
different spheres for example in Natural
Science, the innovation process is very
much different from technology or from
innovations in this field of Art and
Design and
so on, so this was behind this concept of
differentiated knowledge bases, so
actually these authors distinguish
between synthetic knowledge basis, which
is mostly technology analytical, which is
mostly invention of science and symbolic
knowledge basis, design, architecture and
so on. Thank you very much for clarifying
that, and based on this notion, which one
would you say is your main finding?
Actually, basically what was surprising
for me, which I was not very much sure
about before doing this research was
that actually there is a big dominance
in all regions in Europe of synthetic
knowledge base and the basic difference
between the well developed or most
developed original innovation system and
less developed original innovation
systems is that in most developed
innovation systems there is also very
strong role of analytical and
symbolic knowledge base in addition to
synthetic while in less developed regions
the role of analytical and symbolic
knowledge base is relatively weaker and
this is not only related to the economic
structure of the regions, but also to the
ambitions the companies are having
because if the companies are competing
on the state-of-the-art on the
technology frontier then they need to
understand all sort of physical nature
of the phenomena which they are
practically using in their technology in
their production, so actually it's not
only economic structure but also kind of
ambitions or take whether the companies
are competing on high road based or
moving them trying to move the
technology frontier or just basically
our followers and they are oriented on a
relatively standard production
of traditional goods and so on. Okay but
I also see that there was another
important finding related to the
internal structure of R&D in European
regions right, could you please elaborate
on that? yes actually which reclassified
the region to match two regions and
there are two hundred and seventy five
knots two regions in Europe for which we
gain the data and we classify them in
line with the regional innovation
scoreboard and this regional innovation scoreboard
distinguishes the regions in
four categories according to innovation
performance, as innovation leaders, strong
innovators, moderate innovators and
modest innovators, and there was a very
neat structure basically the innovation
leaders and strong innovators had either
balanced size of both these subsystems
public and private or even dominance of
the private R&D private research and
development and the opposite was true
for less developed regions modest or
moderate innovators there was typical
dominance of public research. That is
very interesting, thank you and what
about your personal motivation in
writing this paper? Sure I was always
puzzled when reading the literature on
regional innovation system that there is
very little information about the
variation in size of these two basic
subsystems of original innovation system
because I saw no obvious mechanism, which
might guarantee some kind of balanced
development between the two so I somehow
expected there should be a big variation,
not only an absolute, but also in a
relative size of these two subsystems, so
therefore I look at the empirical data.
That's very nice and which ones would
you say are the main policy implications
of the research?  Basically a main
implications in terms of regional
development in in my view are the
following basically the difference
in economic structure and R&D structure
among the regions are of such a
scale that I would say that it indicates
that different regions are integrated
into global economy in very different
modes and the differences are of such a
scale that actually these differences
imply a long term implications for
evolutionary trajectories for the
future and in terms of practical policy
implications I would say that my
research or our research because it was
done with my PhD student is that
actually we are fully supporting what
Professor Kevin Morgan said already 20
years ago that one sided stress on
science technology innovation paradigm
is actually is outdated in a way or it's
unrealistic and one sided support of
public R&D in lagging regions
might be actually misleading because it
is the innovation the amount of
companies, which actually is the decisive
driver of competitiveness. That's indeed
very interesting and truly fascinating
for your research, so thank you very much
again for having this nice chat with me
and it was a pleasure to have you here
in a coffee break and I hope to see you
next time. Thanks a lot indeed, thanks for
having me here, thanks a lot. Thank you
for watching if you are interested in
more details about these academic
publication fine here the link below and
see you next time bye bye
