Benchmarking Regional Innovation: A Comparison of Bavaria, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland



Republic of Ireland (Table 1). In terms of R&D spending the most significant
differences exist in the business and government sectors, where R&D expenditure as a
percentage of GDP in Bavaria was double that in Ireland. R&D spending by higher
education was more evenly spread across the study regions at 0.34-0.56 per cent of
GDP.

Fourthly, important differences exist between the structure and development of the
regional innovation systems of the study regions. In the Republic of Ireland, for
example, as the low level of public investment in R&D suggests, "The attention to
R&D in the public sector and universities in the Republic of Ireland still lags far
behind other EU and OCED countries, and the R&D innovation system relies heavily
on the private business sector, especially multinational corporation inward investors"
(NIEC, 1999, p. 74). In Northern Ireland, the imbalance is instead towards the
dominance of local R&D by the public sector and higher education with relatively low
levels of R&D investment by locally-based businesses. Hence: "Imbalance in the
Northern Ireland system lies in the dominance of public-sector R&D capabilities in
Government and the lack of research institutions outside government and the
universities" (NIEC, 1999, p. 125). In contrast, Bavaria benefits from the fact that
Germany is a ’highly industrialised country with a well-developed innovative
infrastructure’ (Grupp et al., 1998).

Although the largest of the study regions in terms of total population, Bavaria has a
mixed industrial structure with significant mechanical engineering, aerospace,
automotive and electronic engineering sectors. Another feature of Bavarian industry is
the prevalence of widely dispersed small- to medium-sized manufacturing plants. The
average size of establishment in 1990 was 70.2 workers compared to a West German
average of 153.7 (Jones and Wild, 1994). The RIS of Bavaria has attracted
substantially less attention than that of its neighbour Baden-Württemberg, however,
Bavaria comes second overall in Germany, in patent intensity per 1000 employees in
1996 (see Blind and Grupp, 1999) and has comparable levels of R&D spending
(Table 1). The geographically and sectoral dispersion of Bavarian industry, and the
importance of small to medium enterprises, poses particular problems for innovation
and technology transfer.



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