A growing proportion of innovation, especially in consumer-based industries, is linked to both aesthetic and symbolic components, yet there is still wide uncertainty as to how consumers respond to the design of products and whether their product choices are consistent across product categories. We draw attention to instances whereby less technology-intensive initiatives can convey innovation in services industries. The focus is on the case of Eataly, a food retailer in which, it is argued, non-technological innovations have shaped the firm's core values and triggered consumer interest towards a supermarket where, besides physical goods, experience has become the object of transaction. By emphasizing the importance for retailers of focusing not only on single products, but also on other dimensions of the firm's organization, we intend to contribute to the literature that explores changing facets of innovation in service industries.

The accumulation of knowledge, human capital and agglomeration are indicated as prominent sources of externalities. Therefore, this study examines their contributions to the economic growth of regions in Europe, while accounting for non-linear and threshold effects as well as spatial dependence. The results highlight differentiated growth patterns for less and more developed regions with the effect of knowledge being considerable only in the latter group. The findings suggest that there is the potential for innovation and agglomeration in many less developed regions located in both the new member states (NMS) and the old member states (OMS). However, to reach sustained growth, structural change is necessary in these regions. We conclude that the existing gaps in the economic structure are deemed responsible for the persistence of income disparities. This reinforces the call for specific policy actions in catching-up regions, thus strengthening the arguments in favour of a place-based approach to regional policy.

Although the European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy was intended as sectoral, its recent reforms lead to a stronger territorial vocation, allowing for possible overlaps with the objectives of the Cohesion Policy, the main regional policy of the EU. Through a threshold regression approach, we explore if the possible interactions between these policies influence the agricultural productive performance in more and less developed regions. Results show that in regions with agricultural Gross Value Added per worker lower than 25.53 thousand Euros, both policies exhibit a negative effect, mitigated if they are implemented together. In more productive regions, the effects are the opposite.

This paper examines the dynamic of income distribution in European regions and attempts to relate movements within this distribution to regional structural characteristics and to the impact of cohesion policy (CP). There is evidence that CP supports advanced economic development in lagging and peripheral regions, hence contributing to the 'convergence objective'. The effectiveness of CP, however, depends on the manner in which funds are managed by single regions: the likelihood of progressing in the income distribution is associated, in fact, to the balance between investments in infrastructure and the productive environment, favouring the former. Evidence presented in this paper also relates regional economic performance to the educational level and innovation in regions, providing useful insights for the current debate about reshaping EU cohesion policy toward a more placebased approach.

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