Jacob Rubæk Holm

Regional Employment Growth, Shocks and Regional Industrial Resilience: A Quantitative Analysis of the Danish ICT Sector

Holm J. R. and Østergaard C. R. Regional employment growth, shocks and regional industrial resilience: a quantitative analysis of the Danish ICT sector, Regional Studies. The resilience of regional industries to economic shocks has gained a lot of attention in evolutionary economic geography recently. This paper uses a novel quantitative approach to investigate the regional industrial resilience of the Danish information and communication technology (ICT) sector to the shock following the burst of the dot.com bubble. It is shown that regions characterized by small and young ICT service companies were more adaptable and grew more than others, while diversity and urbanization increased the sensitivity to the business cycle after the shock. Different types of resilient regions are found: adaptively resilient, rigidly resilient, entrepreneurially resilient and non-resilient regions.

Innovation policy: how can it best make a difference?

Research has documented the impact of innovation on industrial and wider economic development (Fagerberg, Srholec, and Verspagen 2010) and today innovation policy is invariably linked to economic growth in general (OECD 2007) and long-term, sustainable growth in particular (OECD 2010; European Commission 2015). Innovation policy is now discussed as a separate policy and academic field (Christensen and Fagerberg 2016) but it is important to bear in mind that the discussion on a proactive or reactive innovation policy is also part of a current, broader discussion on the role of the state; to what extent the state should intervene; and if it should have an initiating or a supporting role. The development towards understanding how the innovation process unfolds and which factors influence innovation has had an impact on innovation policy. This regards not only the often discussed implications of moving from an understanding of innovation as a linear process towards a more systemic and interactive model (Lundvall 2007; Edquist 2011, 2014), but also that innovation is now embedded in a different context than it was previously. Nevertheless, holistic innovation policies have relatively low status and legitimization compared to other, more established policies (Edquist 2014). Moreover, the scope and scale of problems that innovation is expected to address have expanded. Societal challenges like climate change have e.g. been seen as something that will come closer to a solution by way of introducing more innovation into the energy production and consumption (Criscuolo and Menon 2015). The papers included in this issue contribute various answers to the question of how innovation policy can best make a difference.

Destruction and reallocation of skills following large company closures

This paper analyzes what happens to redundant skills and workers when large companies close down and whether their skills are destroyed or reallocated. The analysis is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data of the closure of four companies. Getting a job in a skill‐related industry or moving to a spinoff firm leads to skill reallocation. Thus, the result depends on regional idiosyncrasies such as industry structure and urbanization. If local policy makers and the owners exert a coordinated effort, it is possible to create success stories of less skill destruction in urban as well as peripheral regions.