Knowledge space

This paper provides an analysis of Salzburg region’s innovation performance from a Triple Helix System perspective. The main actors and relationships in the Knowledge, Innovation and Consensus spaces are examined in order to identify key regional innovation challenges, and several policy recommendations are provided for enhancing the innovation performance of an essentially touristic and cultural region. The analysis identified a Knowledge Space that is better developed than the Innovation and Consensus Spaces, but is weak relative to other Austrian regions in terms of education and research performance. The Innovation Space has a low performance, because of a regional specialization in services and low- to medium-technology manufacturing sectors, lack of major industrial concentrations and clusters, small horizontal and vertical business networks, and low start-up intensity relative to the other regions, although the number of start-ups has risen steadily in recent years. There is a poor entrepreneurial culture and a limited pool of start-up founders. The effectiveness of business support organisations like Impulse Centres, Technoparks, the regional business incubator and the COMET Competence Centres aimed to support university-business cooperation is very limited. The Consensus Space is well represented in terms of institutional actors, legal framework and policy instruments, but suffers from a lack of communication and trust between institutional actors, determined primarily by political reasons and bearing a negative impact on innovation governance and the consensus-making process. The interactions between the spaces are also very limited. The region’s vibrant cultural heritage is both a burden and an opportunity. A closer connection between the region’s cultural base and creative potential on the one hand, and initiatives to attract and retain well-educated human capital to the region and strengthen the local entrepreneurial culture, on the other, could improve the regional innovation performance.