Entrepreneurship as a more general field of research has exploded in recent decades. Many different scientific disciplines have contributed to the understanding of entrepreneurship. The definitions, approaches, and results are so diverse that the concept of entrepreneurship may well have become a “catch-all” term (Davidson et al. 2001; OECD 2008). Despite this broad scope, the entrepreneurship literature has contributed a range of interesting theoretical and empirical results, which focus attention upon specific dimensions of how and why founders, teams, and firms act upon the process of entrepreneurship as well as more broadly within the economy and society. Numerous articles and handbooks have endeavored to define the field of entrepreneurship as a research field as well as to define the phenomena and the appropriate lines of enquiry for future research (Shane 2000; Shane & Venktaraman 2000; Carlsson et al. 2013; Landström et al. 2012; Venktaraman et al. 2012).

Research in both journals and books on strategic alliances has increased rapidly since the 1990s. Numerous related topics have been explored, such as globalisation, governance structure, learning capability, and alliance stability. The founding fathers of this literature were analysed by Ling and Chen (2012) in their bibliometric survey, which covered more than 1500 publications and 82,614 citations. Dyer and Singh (1998), Gulati (1995; 1998), Hamel (1991), Kogut (1988), Dyer (1997), Doz and Hamel (1998), and Hamel, Doz, and Prahalad (1989) emerged as the most cited authors. By using the bibliometric technique, it is possible to create a map of science in a specific field or discipline. In the scientific literature, mapping of science can facilitate an understanding of the contemporaneous state of knowledge as the first requirement for a good history of science, facilitating the understanding of conceptual relations. While the analyses of citations and co-citations refer to influential articles of the past, they do not represent the core subfield of contemporary research that is, indeed, the main aim of the bibliographic coupling analysis used in this chapter.

Fundamental and enduring changes brought about by recurrent economic and financial crises, the digital revolution and ongoing globalisation processes of production and innovation activities are posing major challenges for regional and national economies to renew their industrial structures and develop innovations that break existing development trajectories. This calls for new innovation policy approaches that are well equipped to support transformation processes towards new industrial growth paths. This chapter aims to provide the conceptual underpinnings for such a reorientation of innovation policy. We take an innovation system (IS) perspective and develop a comprehensive place-based system failure framework for an innovation policy design that is suitable to promote structural change in different region-specific contexts.

Does invention agglomerate, and if so, where does it agglomerate? In this chapter we examine changes in patterns of agglomeration in invention over time, using data on patent applications from all granted US patents.

There are plenty of reasons to expect invention to agglomerate. Carlino and Kerr’s (2015) recent handbook chapter summarizes many such results, emphasizing the role of input sharing, labor market matching, and knowledge spillovers, among others.

Smart cities are considered as a key area where innovation plays a critical role in making system transformation toward sustainability. Smart cites are based on advanced systems of hardware and software for mutual exchanges of energy and information between supply and demand sides for efficient, flexible, and resilient services, incorporating the behavior of different actors including generators, distributors, technology developers, and consumers through an intelligent network. Improvement in the efficiency of energy consumption will reduce emissions coming from energy generation, particularly those from coal power plants. Flexibility in balancing energy supply and demand through smart meters and affiliated technologies will facilitate the introduction of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, substituting pollution-laden fossil fuels. Electrification of urban infrastructure will also support the deployment of electric vehicles, which do not emit pollutants, unlike the conventional vehicles driven by internal combustion engines.

Innovation agencies around the world are increasingly considering socio-economic-technological challenges that can be tackled through innovation policies (EC Innovation Union; OECD Innovation Strategy). The idea is that, through such challenges, which can relate to such issues as climate change, cancer, or the demographic-aging crisis, innovation policy should produce solutions for societal problems. The present chapter argues that such challenge-driven innovation policies require the traditional market failure justification for policy intervention, and even the system failure one, to be complemented with a more active market creating framework. To this end, the chapter draws on and advances an analysis of the role of public policy in the economy that can provide a more strategic and mission-oriented approach (Mazzucato 2018).

Geographic clustering of people and organizations is a fact of modern economic life. At the aggregate level, around half the world’s population is located in cities. At the industry level, Ellison and Glaeser (1997) and Duranton and Overman (2005) show that in the modal manufacturing industry in the United States and UK, respectively, plants are more clustered geographically than would be expected if they located randomly. These simple facts have been widely interpreted to reflect some sort of advantage of clustering. Wages and prices are higher in cities and in industry clusters such as Silicon Valley (Rosenthal and Strange 2004; Puga 2010). Consequently, businesses in clusters must enjoy some kind of advantages in order to be competitive.

Determining the causal relationship between innovation and growth is a classic quest of the economics of innovation studies. However, empirical research that goes beyond verifying the existence of causality, to investigate the direction, intensity, and mechanisms that explain those causal links is still a green field (Foster and Pyka 2014). Investment in the public goods associated with science, technology, and innovation (STI) activities depends on a country’s available public resources, which opens up a causal loop that may be associated with either growth and welfare or poverty traps. This interaction between investment in STI and growth remains at the core of many theoretical discussions, especially in developing countries, where this investment is expected to drive economic growth, sustain catching up processes, and assist in poverty alleviation.

Europe today is confronted by fundamental changes in its external environment as well as internally, giving rise to several daunting policy challenges. First, there is the economic challenge manifest in slow growth or even stagnation in many countries, which, although also present in other parts of the world, is particularly severe in Europe. Second, there is the challenge posed by the climate crisis, the solution of which requires nothing less than a fundamental transformation from carbon-based growth to a new, sustainable economy. Without this, future generations will be in dire straits. The third challenge concerns the governance and policy crisis now facing Europe and the difficulties this poses for policy making and implementation. It might be argued that the recent rapid growth of immigration to Europe represents a fourth challenge.