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 2). The geographically and sectoral
dispersion of Bavarian industry, and the importance of small to medium enterprises,
poses particular problems for innovation and technology transfer. During the 1990s, a
network of state-backed technology transfer and venture capital companies were set
up to compliment long-established research industry and university based research
centres. For example, the Bavarian Innovation and Technology Transfer Company, a
public limited company established in1995, was tasked with promoting partnership
between firms and knowledge generating institutions, and special support is available
for high-risk R&D projects undertaken by small and medium firms. Resources for
these - and some other similar initiatives - have been derived from the proceeds of
privatisation.
Scotland is the largest of the UK study regions in terms of population at just over
5.1m. Its industrial history mirrors that of Northern Ireland although recent inward
investments - particularly in electronics manufacturing and finance - have done more
to offset the decline in traditional industrial sectors. Scotland is also, of course, a
major tourist and financial services centre unlike Northern Ireland. As a result GDP
per capita in Scotland is close to the EU average (Table 1), although historically
Scotland has had relatively high unemployment rates.
In terms of R&D spending, Scotland lags well behind the UK average in terms of
spending by business and government but has higher than average spending by higher
education. This reflects the strength of the Scottish educational system and in
particularly the prominence of the Scottish university system. Previous studies have
suggested that the deficit in terms of business R&D spend in Scotland relative to the
rest of the UK is also evident in innovation activity (Love and Ashcroft, 1995). A key
element of industrial policy in Scotland over the last few years has been a cluster
based strategy designed to increase local sourcing, strengthen local supply-chains and
attract inward investment in areas where Scotland already has an established supplier
base.
Baden-Württemberg is the most densely populated of the study-regions and ‘has, for
the past twenty-five years, been seen as a model economy. At the heart of that
achievement appeared to be a factor that increasingly explains competitive advantage:
that is, the capacity to innovate" (Cooke, 1997). The region has been described as a
"industrial district with intensive intra-regional linkages between suppliers and
customers and between small and large firms with a dominant engineering base and a
wide variety of different policy measures especially favouring SMEs in the innovation
process" (Sternberg, 1999). Grupp et al. (1998) also suggest that Baden-
Württemberg's R&D performers are particularly strong in the machinery cluster and
therein in transport, engines and machine tools.
Despite these positive features, Grotz and Braun (1997) argue that the Baden-
Württemberg region lacks most of the typical features of a mature industrial district:
"in particular ... levels of inter-firm co-operation in Baden-Württemberg are by no
means above average" (Braczyk, Cooke & Heidenreich, 1998). Cooke (1997), and
more recently Heidenreich and Krauss (1998), also stress the weakness of Baden-