The main focus of work package 2.3 "Local Innovation Systems, Knowledge Flows and the Interaction of Research Competences" is the relationship between innovation, knowledge flows and research competencies within local innovation systems. While we observe successful regions where actors - in pursuing the goal of innovative success - frequently cooperate on a formal or informal basis in R&D with co-located but also with external actors, it is not clear how the network structures resulting from these interactions evolve and what the driving forces for such an evolution are. We also perceive a research gap between theoretical work on the influence of the network structure/position on innovative or economic success and empirical work on this relationship, which we would like to narrow during the workshop.

More specifically, we want to tackle the following questions which are all related to interactions within local innovation systems, the evolution of interaction structures and the performance of innovation systems as well as the actors within these systems:

Question 1: What can we say about the evolution of local, innovative networks in terms of structure, actors and relations?

Question 2: What determines the innovative success of actors with respect to their integration and position within local innovation systems?

Question 3: How can we evaluate the performance of local innovation systems and what characteristics of interactions and interactive structures provide an explanation for innovative success?