The impact of innovation support programs on small and medium enterprises innovation in traditional manufacturing industries: An evaluation for seven European Union regions

We evaluate the effect of innovation support programs on output innovation by small and medium enterprises in traditional manufacturing industry. This focus is motivated by a definition of traditional manufacturing industry that includes capacity for innovation, and by evidence of its continued importance in European Union employment. We conducted a survey in seven European Union regions to generate the data needed to estimate pre-published switching models by means of the copula approach, from which we derived treatment effects on a wide range of innovation outputs. We find that for participants the estimated effects of innovation support programs are positive, typically increasing the probability of innovation and of its commercial success by around 15%. Yet, we also find that a greater return on public investment could have been secured by supporting firms chosen at random from the population of innovating traditional sector small and medium enterprises. These findings indicate the effectiveness of innovation support programs while suggesting reform of their selection procedures.

Global and local governance, industrial and geographical dynamics: A tale of two clusters

This article closely examines two industrial clusters in China, and compares the various adaptations these two clusters have undergone, as well as the mechanisms underlying the industrial and geographical dynamics within these two clusters. Specifically, based on recent field investigation and in-depth interviews during 2011–2014, we examine two types of local governance, and pay attention to the articulation between “governance within global value chains” and “governance within local clusters,” and to how global and local governance co-shape the ways in which and the extents to which local firms participate in the global economy, producing diverse geographies of production and generating diverse trajectories of regional development. The article concludes that local and global governance co-determine domestic firms’ upgrading sources, the strength of their local embeddedness, and the ways in which they conduct spatial and organizational restructuring, such as factory consolidation, factory closure, industrial upgrading, and geographical relocation.