Sustainable Innovation Ecosystems at National and Regional Levels

Abstract

In today’s world, sustainability is one of the most relevant topics, due to economic, social, and environmental challenges that appear in front of national economies and humanity in general. Innovation is crucial for economic development and prosperity, and plays an important role in sustainable development. Governments have a decisive impact on creating conditions for innovation and incentivizing sustainability. Current literature shows visible gaps in research on sustainable innovation ecosystems, from defining the term, to empirical analysis on the topic. The aim of the thesis is to analyze if the governmental policies and innovation lead to change in indicators that are used to measure sustainability in the national innovation ecosystems in three European countries. World Bank Enterprise Survey and PLS-SEM method were used to perform the analysis. The research examines the national and regional innovation ecosystems in empirical way, and indicates to what extent, and in which way, the governmental polices and innovation impact the sustainable outputs, defined by economic, environmental, and social indicators. Results show the difference among countries in terms of reaction to governmental policies, based on country’s innovativeness level.