Regional innovation system research trends: toward knowledge management and entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract

The regional innovation system (RIS) is a popular way of explaining a region's development and competitiveness based on innovation activities and processes. In this paper, bibliometric techniques are used to analyze all RIS studies indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) database as of December 2017. The goal of the analysis is to identify the main trends in RIS research. The evolution of the total number of publications and citations per year indicates that this research field has garnered considerable attention from the scientific community, public administrations, and international organizations. Analysis of the most common keywords and their co-occurrence sheds light on the conceptual framework of RIS research, where knowledge, innovation, clusters, policy, networks, systems, R&D, firms, and industry are key concepts. The 17 most influential RIS articles indexed in WoS CC are identified according to the total number of citations and the ratio of number of citations per year. Reviewing these 17 articles reveals 3 groups of underlying research trends: (1) research on innovation systems, which was mainly conducted in the 1990s, (2) research on knowledge management since the beginning of the 2000s, and (3) research on entrepreneurial ecosystems in recent years. Finally, analysis of citations to these 17 most influential RIS articles reveals strong interconnections according to the number of times they are cited together.

Assessing the Origins, Evolution and Prospects of National Innovation Systems

“…Many influential NIS papers have been published. One method to identify these influential studies is to classify publications by number of citations, which reflects their influence and popularity and the attention received from the scientific community (López-Rubio et al 2020 ). Table 4 presents the 30 most cited NIS studies according to the WoS CC.…”

A systematic mapping review of European Political Science

“…We use WoS data because this database covers most of the volumes of EPS (79.9% of articles). Furthermore, the WoS is the leading academic database (López-Rubio et al 2020 ). We gathered the data in September 2020 from the Core Collection database.…”

“…In recent years, bibliometric studies have focused on the growth of research in different areas of knowledge (Chiu and Ho 2007 ; Bornmann and Mutz 2015 ; Mas-Tur et al 2019 ; Sarin et al 2020 ). The social sciences represent a common target for this type of analysis (De Bakker et al 2005 ; Chao et al 2007 ; Mora et al 2017 ; López-Rubio et al 2020 ).…”

Knowledge management visualisation in regional innovation system collaborative decision-making

“…However, KM "is not solely focused on innovation, but it creates an environment conducive for innovation to take place" (Plessis, 2007, p. 24). RIS research on KM covers knowledge creation, knowledge spillovers, knowledge flows, knowledge-intensive business services, different knowledge bases, and other knowledge-related activities, processes, and agents such as R&D, patents, and clusters (López-Rubio et al, 2020). However, most research has observed these areas theoretically rather than practically.…”