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The aim of this paper is to outline what the intended benefits the smart specialization strategy (S3) is meant to create, and through what policy measures; that is, to shed light over what underpinnings S3 is based on, and if the measures based on these can affect the relations between “academia, businesses, and local authorities” – where the public and the private actors might have partly overlapping interests, but with different needs and rationales.

The research design of this paper is based on the industrial marketing and purchasing network approach, that is, the empirical observation that business exchange has a content, which affects and gives imprints on the actors engaged in the exchange. To determine whether the S3 strategy in general, and in the two investigated regions in particular, can affect the embedding of innovations in using, producing and developing settings, and if so how, this study applied the actors–resources–activities model. In addition to investigation of the S3 strategy in general, two case studies were conducted, one each in two European Union regions with rather different business and academic research characteristics: the Marche region in Italy and the Uppsala region in Sweden.

The S3 measures rest on the judgement of which “domains” to support can be made by policy actors without deeper analysis of how the assumed firms representing these domains are related in terms of how resources are combined and activated. Instead, the S3 policy analysis is based on local policy organizations desk table investigations of what appears as innovative. Hence, in practice, the key S3 measure is still to transfer knowledge from the public to the private sector. This entails that support in terms of how to create change in established resources interfaces, which is a main source of innovation to which both established and emerging localized firms are related, remains out of policy sight.

The ambition with this paper is to discuss what changes S3 – with the ambition to develop and match academic research to business needs – implies and what underpinnings it is resting on. Hence, the focus is directed to what new types of policy arrangements are supposed to result in what types of benefits – and last but not least, the ability for these to interfere with businesses which are interconnected across spatial borders.

Previous IMP research has shown that innovation benefits tend to gravitate across organisational, company and legal borders. However, OECD and EU policy assume that innovation investments will create benefits in close spatial relation to where these were made. The overall purpose of this paper is to consider how opportunities and obstacles of innovation appear from the perspective of: a national policy actor, its regional mediators and a policy supported and research-based firm engaged in innovation. A specific interest is directed to what interactive aspects that are considered by these actors; in the using, producing and developing settings.

Influenced by the research question and theoretical point of departure the authors investigate what type of interfaces our focal actors recognise in the using, producing and developing settings. A total of 41 face-to-face and phone interviews focusing on each actor’s approach were conducted; 23 interviews in order to investigate the “policy side” of innovation attempts, while 18 interviews have been performed in order to understand a single business actor’s innovation approach.

The study shows that both the national policy agency and the regional policy mediators primarily operate within a developing setting, and furthermore, applies a rather peculiar interpretation of proximity. As long as the developing setting of the innovation journey is in focus, with the task to transfer academic knowledge advances to commercial actors, the proximity aspect is rather easy to fulfil. However, as soon as the producing and using settings of the innovation is taken into consideration, the innovation, if it survives, will gravitate to a producing setting where it can contribute to investments in place.

The study investigates the opportunities and obstacles of innovation; the spatial aspects included, and how these are considered by: a national policy agency, a regional mediator and a policy-supported innovating firm, in order to juxtapose the policy doctrine with the experience of the business actors such policy wishes to support.

Historically, a transactional perspective has dominated the business negotiation literature. This perspective includes the notions that business negotiations are a linear process that follows episodic or stage models, business negotiations are geared toward an outcome in the form of a one-time transaction, business negotiations focus on a single negotiator or negotiation in a dyad and the research has historically viewed negotiation as a “zero-sum” game. Inspired by a long tradition of empirical studies of business relationships, there is good reason to apply a conceptual analysis to challenge these four assumptions and propose an alternative view on the negotiation process. The purpose of this paper is to contrast how aspects of business negotiations are commonly conceptualized with the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) perspective and develop propositions that will contribute to future research by offering guidelines for the development of business negotiation literature.

To contribute to a discussion on the relation between conceptualization and research results, definitions within the existing literature regarding business negotiation are contrasted with similar definitions of concepts from the IMP perspective.

Four propositions have been formulated that further the conceptual understanding of business negotiation. Moreover, a need for future methodological deliberations is demonstrated, and suggestions for future research in the field are offered.

Introducing a relational perspective into the conceptually rather underdeveloped stream of research would help to develop the existing critique within the business negotiation literature of its transactional, linear and dyadic focus.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe the forces which promote or obstruct a policy-initiated innovation process in the context of a regional strategic network (RSN).

An innovation requires that an invention survives in relevant developing, producing and using settings. This is analyzed as resource interaction in these three settings. Data are obtained from a case study of an innovation process undertaken from 2007 to 2011 where 24 respondents representing the involved actors in the development of a geographical information system technology platform were interviewed in separate meetings lasting 60-100 minutes. Primary sources of secondary data have also been analyzed.

The strategy imposed by the RSN enabled knowledge to be exchanged between the involved actors, but problems remained regarding resource interaction of the relevant settings. The studied case showed that achieving resource interaction between the producing and using settings was particularly challenging when the innovation processes is policy-initiated and thus involves both the private sector and the public sector. This serves to explain why policy initiatives to turn scientific knowledge into commercialized innovation often fall short of their objectives.

Research investigating policy-initiated innovation and regional economic growth often focuses on achieving information exchange between the actors that make up the innovation systems. This paper sheds light on the resource interaction between the members of RSN s and how this can facilitate the innovation processes.

The European Union has an ambition to become the world’s most competitive and knowledge-based economy, which entails investments in cluster initiatives. Most researchers, however find that such investments have had limited impact. The notion of creating industrial clusters is influenced by the discourse within new economic geography in which research interests are geared toward facilitating knowledge exchange between industry, university and government. In order to understand how knowledge is created and enacted within a cluster initiative the purpose of this paper is to investigate the interactions between actors participating in a specific innovation process.

The studied cluster initiative is one of the 55 clusters designated as demonstrating highly sophisticated cluster management by European Union officials, making it an interesting case study for knowledge creation in such environments. The case study entails semi-structured in-depth interviews of 24 respondents.

The cluster approach encourages a “disentangled” view of knowledge where knowledge is seen as universal and cognitive and therefore possible to disentangle from the context in which it was initially produced. However, my findings suggest that in practice knowledge is “entangled” in the specific context in which it is enacted and produced.

Thus, in practice knowledge is a contextually limited and practical activity that is being enacted when heterogeneous resources interact in producer-user interfaces. This mismatch between strategy and outcome may subsequently help to explain the limited impact of policy on regional growth.

This paper aims to present a historical case study of Norwegian transnational entrepreneurs (1880s–1930s) and the ecosystems that they founded in Russia’s Arctic periphery. Drawing from the contemporary transnational entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem literature, and inspired by AnnaLee Saxenian’s concept of “brain circulation,” this study explores the journey and impact of these entrepreneurs in a time of evolving political turbulence.

This study applies a mixed-methodology approach, drawing from nine qualitative interviews held in 2021 and secondary material, including historical books, a podcast, videos and archival data.

The Norwegian entrepreneurs were both “pulled” by and “pushed” to the Russian region, their “New America,” where they could apply their personal skills and exploit their rich social and financial capital to establish a local entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, radical political change altered the context, which led many of the entrepreneurs to re-migrate to Norway.

This paper demonstrates the role of the political context for contemporary entrepreneurship and management research, as transnational entrepreneurs and international expatriates remain vulnerable to political change.

Public-policy actors and managers in companies need to support highly-skilled transnational entrepreneurs, including expatriates, in a setting with turbulence, crisis and even war, to foster the sustainable contribution of entrepreneurial migrants to regional economic development across different countries.

This paper presents an original, novel case study on the historical role of transnational entrepreneurs across different cultural settings, their impact on a foreign peripheral location, including social-network building and evolving political change in the historical context. The findings are relevant for contemporary management literature.