Innovation is the cornerstone of success in the modern economy at firm, industry, regional, and national levels. An enormous body of academic literature documents how innovation and innovative practices flourish in the fertile environments of mature market economies, driving sustainable economic growth. A young strand of the literature, interdisciplinary in nature, investigates national innovation systems (Lundvall, 1992; Nelson, 1993) and, more recently, innovation systems at the regional (Asheim and Gertler, 2004; Uyarra, 2010)
