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Purpose: Economic development agendas usually drive innovation, and it is an essential tool for government institutions to promote economic growth. The Quadruple Helix Model of Innovation captures the process by integrating and overlapping knowledge and technology, forming an aggregate output invested in producing more products and services, innovation, and technology. This chapter focuses on how the quadruple helix supports the linkage between knowledge creation, innovation output, and enhancing regional and national competitiveness.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter also illustrates the triple helix concept and then the quadruple helix model of innovation, focusing on the four main aspects, i.e., Government, Universities, Industry, and Civil society. The authors aim to simulate the economic significance of evolving, rapidly adaptive, and interdisciplinary knowledge and innovation ecosystems.

Findings: The findings and examples stated in several different MENA regions can boost the economy as various platforms provide digital transformation, encourage culture awareness in schools, encourage youth empowerment, and support tech start-ups. They can drive forward the index of creativity and innovation within entrepreneurs and the general members of society. Recommendations include a further study to modify the model and customize it based on the country’s needs.

Originality/value: This chapter of the book focuses on the four main aspects of the quadruple helix model of innovation with specific examples in several countries. The chapter would be beneficial for the upcoming entrepreneurs and students who progress in developing tech start-ups and digitization.

Competitiveness of cities forces the city and public sector representatives to invent new methods of management and use the innovative thinking. Success of cities, based on Etzkowitz and Leyedesdorff (2000), has to take into account new strategies of co-operation of the academic institutions with the local authorities, entrepreneurs (in our case in tourism business) and new graduates focused on high-tech industries and start-up businesses. This trend is based on the principles of New Economic Geography (Krugman, 1994; Porter, 1998) and the new Theory of Growth (Romer, 1990), which enforce the importance of knowledge capital and smart technologies. Hjalager (2002) supported the idea of the importance of the institutional innovations and Ward (1998) mentioned that universities and research institutes are key entities to promote smart technologies and decisions in a city (Triple Helix concept). The purpose of the chapter is to discuss the results of research conducted in Waterloo, Canada, Ontario, which belongs to the Ontario Technological Triangle. Waterloo is a city of two universities, Waterloo University and Wilfred Laurier University. The purpose of the chapter is to discuss the results of research conducted in Waterloo, Canada, Ontario, which was focused on the competitiveness growth through the implementation of the smart management systems (Triple Helix Model) in the city marketing and governance. Some of these approaches influenced also tourism business due to multiplication effect and the growing competitiveness is a source of a continual growth of students, visitors and entrepreneurs to the city and the region.

This chapter addresses the question how entrepreneurial synergies can be stimulated in places by leadership and network governance in the context of the knowledge economy. The chapter not only analyses the role of leadership in a regional case in the Netherlands, but also assesses to what extend place-based characteristics play a role.

The chapter is based on a case-study-analysis of the region Brainport Eindhoven. Data were collected via 27 interviews in 2 rounds (in 2008 and in 2012), and retrieved from academic literature, case documents and governmental plans.

This chapter shows the importance of knowledge leadership in creating entrepreneurial synergies in the region Brainport Eindhoven. Entrepreneurial synergies is defined here as the creation of governance conditions and a context for effective entrepreneurial activities and regional co-operation between entrepreneurs, to enhance innovation. The socio-spatial quality of this place, path-dependency and the establishment of a regional regime explain the clustering of high-tech firms in a context of pro-active policy support, embedded in a cultural tradition of public–private co-operation. Key-persons of the private sector, science, and government enabled the development by taking initiative, co-operating, framing issues and aligning people around the agenda of Brainport.

The chapter gives insights on how leaders can enhance entrepreneurial synergies rooted in place-based assets and characteristics, by using network power, resources, ‘windows of opportunity’ and by linking ideas, inspiration and individuals from different strands of the triple-helix.

Revealing normative leadership lessons – how leadership is enacted in ‘everyday’ practice – may also allow us to explain, at least to some limited extent, why some localities are able to adapt to the ever changing social and economic conditions of the modern world, and are successful in creating entrepreneurial synergies. Beyond this, deeper critical appreciations provide us with insights into the interplay between leadership, power and resources – and shed light on the questions of why and for whom economy and society are ‘organised’, in different places and at different times.

The chapter offers new insights in the importance of place and the leadership dimension in the context of the continuing debate around the effectiveness of sub-national economic development policy for the so-called ‘knowledge era’.

This chapter deals with the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on technological performance. We argue that, when it provides additional technological resources, M&A promote the creation of more value in the innovation process. Instead, when it allows the redeployment of complementary assets, M&A enable more value to be captured from the innovations, and hence foster firms’ incentives in the innovation process. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of deals that were completed in the U.S. “medical devices and photographic equipment” sector in the period 1988–1996.

This chapter analyzes and considers new business strategies in the area of ICT, where competition is intense, in regard to mechanisms for companies to achieve ongoing change as a means of realizing corporate innovation. As a case study, the chapter takes a look at Japan’s Softbank, which in recent years acquired Sprint Mobile, a major U.S. carrier, to become the largest mobile communications carrier in the world. When the only vital element for achieving ongoing corporate innovation is the demonstration of top-down leadership as centralized leadership through the presence of certain charismatic leaders or a management team, it will be difficult for a company to achieve ongoing strategic innovation. The presence of not only leaders, managers, and staff who have centralized leadership to assist and foster the development of autonomous, distributed knowledge integration (creation) activities that occur locally in every department within a company, but also leaders, managers, and staff who apply dialectical thinking to various contexts and who promote creative knowledge integration (creation) activities locally through distributed leadership is essential. This chapter analyzes and contemplates mechanisms for achieving corporate innovation through the implementation of dialectical leadership where practitioners at every management layer dynamically differentiate between centralized leadership and distributed leadership or allow for both forms of leadership to coexist to respond to changes in the environment through holistic leadership.

As proposed by Brandenburger and Nalebuff (1996), the concept of coopetition which highlights the coexistence of both collaborative and competitive forces in interorganizational settings aims to provide a new way of thinking for accelerating the innovation process and generating greater value. However, despite such recognitions, our understanding about how coopetition can help facilitate the innovation process in small and medium enterprises is rather limited. This should warrant a separate stream of research on this issue. Drawing on the concept of effectuation, we will explore the coopetitive innovation process in entrepreneurial firms. Sarasvathy (2001) proposed five principles embedded in the effectuation decision-making process of entrepreneurship. This process starts with a given set of means and controllable goals, followed by interactions with other stakeholders until they are all committed. The final stage leads to the creation of new products and services. The first two stages, means and goals, are the preparation stage in which an entrepreneurial firm distinguishes itself from large established corporations and establishes a base to leverage its contingency according to existing means and acceptable losses. After that, the effectuation process enters into the interaction and commitment stage during which the firm seeks relationships with stakeholders. We argue that the coopetitive forces can appear in the interaction and commitment stages to enlarge and capture value for the entrepreneurial firm involved.

The potential impact of farmer's innovations for the development of food regimes is the topic of this chapter. Two case studies analysed from the perspective of strategic niche management show that there is niche formation visible as an alternative to the dominant modern food regime. These innovations are based upon the active rediscovery of marginalised and often forgotten knowledge and result in effective linkages between old and new knowledge. This retro side of innovations can have a large potential for developing viable alternatives for rural development. Social scientists play an important role in the understanding of the retro side of innovations and its potential and influence on the prevailing knowledge and information systems inside and outside of the scientific domain.

The aim of the chapter is to highlight the limits and opportunities linked to the use of tools such as interactive marketing and communication in small creative businesses comprising Italian jewellery districts to achieve greater competitiveness of local systems on global markets.

From secondary data and the analysis of district websites, the specificity of Italian jewellery districts is analysed in terms of relational and learning differences. Starting from a circumscribed (isolated), experience of hands-on learning, it is suggested that systemic progress can be made within a collective local system of learning (i.e. a virtuous and widespread knowledge of the district system) by virtue of internet-based technologies (IBT). In this respect, the chapter evidences how the productive and creative specificity of Italian jewellery district systems can gain impetus, in terms of greater competitiveness, from the use of IBT.