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What Is the Effect of Synergy Provided by International Collaborations on Regional Economies?

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Abstract

In the present paper, we analyze the effect of international collaboration on regional markets. We compare two Norwegian counties with very different profiles in terms of how international or regional cooperation affects the synergy generated among the geographical, technological, and organizational distributions of firms. This synergy is much larger in the rural region with international industry than in the region with a strong knowledge infrastructure. International firms can take the role of knowledge brokers in lagging regions with weak knowledge institutions. The methodological contribution of this study is that we translate the synergy (abstractly measured in bits of information) into more familiar economic terms, such as turnover for the special case of domestic-foreign collaborations. The analysis is based on Norwegian data, as Norway is a small country with an open and export-oriented economy. Data for Norway is publicly available in great detail. The Triple-Helix synergy caused by firms with foreign ownership is a new indicator of the international contribution to the efficiency of the innovation system in a region. The indicator can also be interpreted as a measure of the attractiveness of regional industries to international corporations, which entails the perspective of international technology transfer and the access of regional industry products to global markets.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the conference Cross-Border Markets of Goods and Services: Issues for Research, held by the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia, May 27–28, 2015. We acknowledge comments and feedback from several colleagues in the discussion. We thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions for improvements of the manuscript. Inga Ivanova acknowledges support within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) and within the framework of a subsidy by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE), 20 Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russia

    Inga Ivanova

  2. Department of International Business, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Aalesund, PO Box 1517, 6025, Aalesund, Norway

    Øivind Strand

  3. Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, PO Box 15793, 1001 NG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Loet Leydesdorff

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  1. Inga Ivanova
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  2. Øivind Strand
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Correspondence to Inga Ivanova.

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Ivanova, I., Strand, Ø. & Leydesdorff, L. What Is the Effect of Synergy Provided by International Collaborations on Regional Economies?. J Knowl Econ 10, 18–34 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-017-0480-2

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