All of us three in the project I’m currently working on – Innovative Regions and Economic Development in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area – gave a presentation at The Annual Meeting of Finnish Geographers last week. Our presentations were in two sessions held by the manager of the project, professor Tommi Inkinen. Themes of the sessions were economic, traffic and innovation geography. PhD student Maria Merisalo presented the synopsis of her doctoral thesis about digitalization. Prof. Inkinen gave a presentation about the knowledge based business clusters in Helsinki Metropolitan Area. My presentation showed early results of spatial correlation of innovations and human capital and creative class in Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The presentation is available in SlideShare, but unfortunately only in Finnish at the moment. Next March I’m going to go to AAG Annual Meeting in San Fransisco, so at the latest in spring there’s going to be presentation also in English. Until then, you can read my blog, where I’m going to post parts of the presentation from time to time.
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Global Perspective
Finland has been ranked among one of the most innovative countries throughout the history of such rankings. In their latest Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum assesses Finland as the leader of the world in its capacity to innovate. WEF has measured innovation through seven different indicators. Finland's strength lies especially in education and training system (1st), collaboration between universities and industry (1st) as well as in public and private R&D investments (3rd). National Perspective Helsinki is the capital of Finland and considered as the only metropolitan city region of the country. Helsinki Metropolitan Region is the most developed region in Finland and in terms of relative R&D spending and granted patents it ranks third most innovative region in Finland (Makkonen & Inkinen). In terms of absolute amount of R&D spending and granted patents Helsinki would surely be the most innovative region in Finland. Regional Perspective Considering Helsinki Metropolitan Region is the leading region of the most innovative country in the world, it would be greatly beneficial to study innovations within this city region. That is why I'm going to examine the subject in my PhD thesis from September 2015 on. The most obvious goal is 1) to find out where the clusters of innovation lie in Helsinki Metropolitan Region. The interest is not only to learn if the geography of innovation is multi nodal within city region, but also to investigate 2) if clusters of innovation boost economic development. Inspiration for these questions comes from findings of nationwide research by Makkonen & Inkinen. The latter part of the thesis discusses the platforms that generate innovation. Assumed sources for local innovation growth are 3) human capital (i.e. educated workforce), 4) regional prosperity (i.e. universities and other public institutions) as well as 5) infrastructure (i.e. accessibility, level of urbanization). The spatial clusters of each three seedbed will be examined by advanced quantitative methods as well as their correlation with the level of cluster's innovation. Methods and indicators that will be used are going to be the topics of my next blog posts. If the topic hooked You, You might want to go and visit my Facebook and Twitter accounts and click 'Like'. |
Photo by Rob Hurson
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July 2018
AuthorJuho Kiuru, geographer living in Helsinki, Finland. |