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This paper elaborates a view on knowledge as the result of a combinatorial search activity, so as to investigate its effects on economic growth at the regional level. Empirical estimations corroborate the hypothesis that knowledge coherence and variety, besides the traditional measure of knowledge stock, matter in shaping regional economic performances. The check for spatial dependence suggests that cross-regional externalities exert additional triggering effects on growth, without debasing the effects of knowledge properties. Important policy implications stem from the analysis, in that regional innovation strategies should be carefully coordinated so as to reach a higher degree of internal coherence and trigger economic performances.

International audienceAmid increasing interest in firm age and its effects on firm performance, this special issue offers an exhaustive review of the literature and a novel collection of evidence on the effects of firm age on performance, including a special focus of interest on innovation performance, financial performance, exports, survival and growth. This editorial positions the theme in the extant literature, and provides key definitions and challenges ahead in the field of evolutionary economics. It introduces the collection of articles composing the special issue. The papers offer a diversity of country contexts, as well as analytical approaches and methods. They include an exhaustive review of the literature on age and firms’ performance, and present original empirical studies focusing on the effects of age on firms’ economic outcomes on the one hand, and on innovation outcomes on the other hand. While most of the papers use econometric analysis, the level of analysis ranges from firm to individual

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Green technologies and smart specialisation strategies: a European patent-based analysis of the intertwining of technological relatedness and Key-Enabling-Technologies.

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ABSTRACT.This paper analyzes the contribution of high-growth firms to the process of knowledge creation. We articulate a demand-pull innovation framework in which knowledge creation is driven by sales growth, and knowledge stems from creative recombination. Given the established literature on high growth firms and economic growth, we wonder whether gazelles follow patterns of knowledge creation mostly dominated by exploration or exploitation strategies. To this purpose, we derive indicators able to describe the structure of knowledge and qualify firms' innovation strategies. The empirical results suggest that the reality is richer than the interpretative frameworks. Increasing growth rates are indeed associated to exploration strategies, supporting the idea that high growth firms are key actors in the creation of new technological knowledge. But in the meantime, firms showing growth rates significantly higher than the average are able to command the exploration strategies by constraining them within the boundaries of familiar technological competences, suggesting that the exploration process is less random than anticipated. We end up with the result that high growth firms, and especially gazelles, follow predominantly an exploration strategy, but with the characteristics of an organized search which is often more observed in an exploitation strategy.