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Against the backdrop of the current political developments in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, such as Ukraine, Poland, and Romania, the question arises as to the role played by economic transformation and the resulting innovation linkages in these countries over the last 20 years. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of economic and institutional dimensions on the development of CEE countries, explicitly distinguishing between European Union (EU) members and non‐members, and thus reflecting the differences in institutions and path dependency. Furthermore, the paper contrasts the performance of CEE countries with that of Western European countries. To achieve these objectives, the impact of factors such as innovation, institutions, and political practices on the economic development of 37 European countries from 2000 until 2020 is followed using fixed effects regression and Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The results of the analysis show the importance of institutional factors such as low levels of corruption, political freedoms, and intellectual property. The effect of institutional variables was particularly pronounced in the case of non‐EU countries, which indicates the particular importance of the development of stable institutions for achieving higher levels of economic development for this category of countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the impact of the different proximity dimensions on the subsequent innovation performance of firms which received radical knowledge spillovers. The analysis for the case of biotechnology small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in Germany is based on a dataset covering the period from 1998 to 2017. Results indicate the positive impact of social and organizational proximity on the innovation performance of radical knowledge recipients. Geographical proximity has a negative impact, whereas for cognitive proximity a U-shaped relation is observed. The paper contributes to the innovation economics and economic geography literature by underlining the peculiarities of the effectiveness of radical knowledge spillovers. Additionally, the importance of policy support for SMEs across regions and technological fields is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exceptional innovations have recently been investigated in the literature as they may change the trajectories of field or regional development and thus impact their innovation and economic performance. However, there still lacks empirical evidence as to the impact of different types of knowledge bases on the emergence of discontinuous, breakthrough, or radical innovations. This study addresses this research gap and investigates the impact of analytical, synthetic, and symbolic knowledge bases on the share of different types of exceptional innovations in the Central European regions during the 2010–2018 period. Results indicate the positive impact of the symbolic knowledge base on the share of radical and discontinuous innovations, whereas the analytical knowledge base has a negative impact on the radical and synthetic knowledge bases – on discontinuous innovations. Contrariwise, none of the knowledge bases were relevant to the emergence of breakthrough innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]