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Many developed countries are facing a demographic change with an increasing share of older individuals, yet little is known about how older workers will impact regional and national economies in terms of labor market dynamics. This Handbook deals with the important and emerging field of entrepreneurship among this group and focuses on the behavioral perspectives of this phenomenon; on innovation, dynamics and performance; and the ways entrepreneurship among the elderly looks within different countries. [From publisher's description]

The economic crisis has had severe and negative impacts on the EU over the last decade. This book focuses on a neglected dimension by examining European political entrepreneurship in times of economic crisis with particular emphasis on EU member-states, institutions and policies. The main focus is on the role that the political entrepreneur can play in promoting entrepreneurship and growth. It is argued that the political entrepreneur and political entrepreneurship can positively influence the conditions for entrepreneurial activity and business.

The authors discuss the controversial area of industrial policy which, after the 2008 crisis, faced the reaction that markets do not always perform optimally for society, generating a demand for new policy models. The chapter shows how the views on industrial policy have changed from a long-term perspective, with a special focus on the post-war period up to the current post-industrial society. The authors argue that industrial policies should be placed at the regional level and that small- and medium-sized regions need different policies than do large urban regions. In addition, this chapter briefly evaluates the EU’s current approach to industrial policy – the so-called smart specialisation – and sheds light on the problems related to this policy initiative.

Political Entrepreneurship explores the role of political entrepreneurs in regional growth and entrepreneurial diversity. The authors define a political entrepreneur as a politician, bureaucrat or officer within the publicly funded sector who encourages entrepreneurship for growth and employment using innovative approaches. This book aims to enrich the established research on entrepreneurship with in-depth knowledge of the conditions conducive for political entrepreneurship in Sweden.

In recent decades we have been able to witness a veritable revolution in the world economy, with dramatic changes in the competitiveness of nations, regions and companies. The most commonly used term to describe this revolution has been ‘globalization’, even if there is no common definition of this term in the literature. In fact, all definitions of globalization are elusive and elicit criticism (Thurik et al., 2013). Generally, the term is connected with the rapid increase in the free movement of goods, capital, people, ideas, information and knowledge around the globe. The shift of economic activities between regions in different national spheres ranks among the most vigorous changes shaping the economic landscape of today (Dreher et al., 2008). Much of the discussion about globalization has been held at a rather superficial macroeconomic level. Discussions at the meso- and microeconomic level, that is, the level of regions and companies, have been much less common, and many have also been biased in the sense that they have only given a partial picture. One obvious example is that discussions on the role of innovation and entrepreneurship have tended to use a narrow definition of entrepreneurship as the start-up of new companies; as a result they have ignored the high degree of innovation and entrepreneurship within many incumbent companies. This is problematic, since innovation and entrepreneurship, generating new technologies, new products and new production processes, are at the core of economic development and growth (Hall, 1999).

This chapter provides a theoretically informed discussion of creativity in social capital and elaborates on its role in economic growth and development based on recent theoretical developments in evolutionary economics and economic geography. We discuss social capital as an explanatory factor for creativity and creative processes in the short run, but also creativity as a factor having impacts on social networks, norms and values in the long run. The theoretical discussions are complemented with empirical illustrations and examples. Our starting point is that creativity has both an individual and a collective component, which are both linked to social capital., QC 20150313. QC 20200710

Accessibility has for many years been a widely used tool in transportation research. Many definitions have been suggested and researchers have constructed numerous mathematical formulations to measure its value in order to be able to evaluate the relationships between the nature of the transport systems and the patterns of land use. Such correlations have been used especially in assessing existing transport systems and forecasting their performance to provide decision-makers with ideas about the need for investments in the transport systems. However, accessibility measures can be regarded as the spatial counterparts of discounting. The measures represent the spatial distribution of economic agents and their activities in a simple way that imposes a very clear structure upon the relationship between these agents and their activities and their environment. Various frictional effects arising from geographical distance between economic agents determine their interaction options, that is, their options to trade, to cooperate, to learn, to commute, and so on. Observing that the time sensitivities of the economic agents vary between different spatial scales (and between different economic activities) we may impose a spatial structure (for example, local, intra-regional, interregional and international) which offers opportunities to define variables in such a way that spatial dependencies can be accommodated. These newly defined variables can then be used in empirical explanations of various spatial phenomena, such as patent output, new firm formation, the emergence of new export products, and economic growth in different spatial units. We will in this chapter against this background show that accessibility is an underused analytical and empirical tool in regional science with an underestimated potential.

The contributions in this volume extend our understanding about the different ways distance impacts the knowledge conversion process. Knowledge itself is a raw input into the innovation process which can then transform it into an economically useful output such as prototypes, patents, licences and new companies. New knowledge is often tacit and thus tends to be highly localized, as indeed is the conversion process. Consequently, as the book demonstrates, space or distance matter significantly in the transformation of raw knowledge into beneficial knowledge.

Regional economic development has experienced considerable dynamism over recent years. Perhaps the most notable cases were the rise of China and India to emergent country status by the turn of the millennium. With time now for hindsight, this book identifies some of the key forces behind these development successes, namely agglomeration, clusters and entrepreneurship.

This book highlights the role of entrepreneurship, social capital and governance for regional economic development. In recent decades, many researchers have claimed that entrepreneurship is the most critical factor in sustaining regional economic growth. However, most entrepreneurship research is undertaken without considering the fundamental importance of the regional context. Other research has emphasized the role of social capital but there are substantial problems in empirically relating measures of social capital to regional economic development. © Charlie Karlsson, Börje Johansson and Roger R. Stough 2012. All rights reserved.

The contributions forming the different chapters in this book were first presented and discussed at the Eight Uddevalla Symposium 2005 ... held at and hosted by the University West, Uddevalla, Sweden.

The contributions forming the different chapters in this book were first presented and discussed at the Seventh Uddevalla Symposium 2004 on 'Regions in competition and Co-operation'.

The contributions forming the different chapters in this book were first presented and discussed at the Seventh Uddevalla Symposium 2004 on 'Regions in competition and Co-operation".

The contributions forming the different chapters in this book were first presented and discussed at the Eight Uddevalla Symposium 2005 ... held at and hosted by the University West, Uddevalla, Sweden.