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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to create a research framework to scrutinize how individuals' digital technology use produces tangible and intangible outcomes in online (digital) and offline realms.Design/methodology/approachThe paper applies the Bourdieusian e-capital perspective to create a theory-based framework. The framework was used to guide a survey design to explore women's “social media-assisted reuse” at the micro-scale in Helsinki, Finland.FindingsThe paper argues that a new form of capital emerges when individuals utilize digital technologies in correspondence to their goals to gain added value that would be impossible or significantly more arduous to gain without the digital realm. The survey indicates that the respondents utilize the digital space – set objectives and gain capital-related outcomes – in correspondence to their differing social, economic and cultural positions and related resources in- and outside of the digital realm.Practical implicationsIf digital spaces – due to social inequality and underlying power structures – become increasingly stratified, there will be significant impacts on how individuals from differing backgrounds gain accumulated forms of capital through the digital realm. The question is of great importance for battling inequality.Originality/valueThe paper enhances and synthesizes recent discussions on different forms of capital and outcomes of the use of digital technologies and presents a combined “e-capital–digital divide” framework that offers a more complete agenda for investigating the finely nuanced links between the inputs, outputs and outcomes of digital technology use.

International boundaries have been mainly considered as barriers in literature on the ‘cross-border regional innovation system’ (CBRIS), in line with their traditional understanding. In this paper, we underline that such a perspective presents limits, and argue in favour of an understanding of multidimensional borders that are subject to dynamic change over time. By mobilizing conceptualizations from the field of border studies, we examine the various functions of borders to explain the innovation-led development potential in cross-border regions. In this view, international borders can function as an interface, a marker of difference or a symbol, rather than a mere barrier that separates regions. Further, we suggest that these border functions are key factors in explaining the ‘fluctuating’ integration dynamics of regional innovation systems across the border. Mobilizing evidence from two case studies in European and North American contexts, the paper sheds light on the border as a potential resource for innovation and discusses implications for future research.

The research on innovation in the maritime sector has commonly focused on the implementation of innovation rather than on more complex issues such as the interplay between technological aspects, market conditions, and, particularly, regulatory regimes in shaping the emergence and growth of global systems involved with the development, production, and use of environmental innovation. Therefore, this paper sets out to analyze—by combining insights from sectoral (SSI) and technological (TIS) systems of innovation concepts—ballast water treatment systems (BWTS), designed to prevent the negative impacts of invasive species, as an example of such complex interaction. The results show how public policy and institutional acceptance have shaped the market for BWTS. First, BWTS were induced by environmental regulations mandating their use. Second, the demand for BWTS increases substantially when the implementation date of the regulations approaches. Third, differences in regulatory regimes shape the demand for various available technologies. Without coordinated regulations, this unclear operating environment remains a definite concern for shipowners when choosing the specific type of BWTS technology for onboard installation. The results also underline that the combined SSI/TIS framework, utilized in this paper, is a feasible analytical framework for studying environmental innovation.

This paper studies cross-border cooperation at the US-Canadian Cascadia region by implementing an in-depth analysis to examine the role of cognitive proximity as a proxy for favourable conditions f...

Enterprises located in rural regions face various challenges in the globalised and digitised world. This book offers comprehensive answers to the question of what makes up the rural enterprise economy in the contemporary business world. It addresses the competitiveness and viability, strategic management and strategic change, and marketing issues for both incumbent and start-up companies in rural regions. The book presents new concepts that shed light on the rural enterprise economy with its entrepreneurs. With a broad range of cases from European regions, the book provides theoretical insights for scholars, practical case-based evidence for lecturers and teachers, and practical knowledge for business practitioners and planning specialists. Academic experts from European universities and research institutes provide compelling answers to this under-researched topic in business studies and economics.

The present paper explores the unresolved issue in regional planning of whether small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit from being located in border regions in terms of cross-border coop...

This paper investigates the relationship between innovation and employment by analyzing the factors that drive job creation processes and particularly by scrutinizing the role of innovation on the ...

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent public health restrictions led to a significant slump in economic activities around the globe. This slump has met by various policy actions to cushion the detrimental socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis and eventually bring the economy back on track. We provide an ex-ante evaluation of the effectiveness of a massive increase in research and innovation (R&I) funding in Finland to stimulate post-crisis recovery growth through an increase in R&I activities of Finnish firms. We make use of the fact that novel R&I grants for firms in disruptive circumstances granted in 2020 were allocated through established R&I policy channels. This allows us to estimate the structural link between R&I funding and economic growth for Finnish NUTS-3 regions using pre-COVID-19 data. Estimates are then used to forecast regional recovery growth out of sample and to quantify the growth contribution of R&I funding. Depending on the chosen scenario, our forecasts point to a mean recovery growth rate of GDP between 2-4% in 2021 after a decline of up to -2.5% in 2020. R&I funding constitutes a significant pillar of the recovery process with mean contributions in terms of GDP growth of between 0.4% and 1%., Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables

The growing interest in addressing societal challenges is changing research and innovation policy dynamics. However, a challenge-oriented approach requires specific public sector capacities to coordinate and provide directionality, while having an innovation ecosystem with sufficient scientific and technological capabilities to address the grand societal challenges effectively. From this perspective, a challenge-oriented policy is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and the literature has only recently started investigating the territorial differences. The current paper proposes a composite index to assess REgional Societal Challenges-Oriented REadiness (RE-SCORE). An exploratory experimental application is conducted to examine and compare Italian regions facing four selected societal challenges (SCs): bioeconomy, climate change, health and inclusive, innovative and reflective societies. The findings show that the Italian regional readiness to address SCs is highly heterogeneous, going beyond the ‘traditional’ North-South divide. The index allows us to benchmark regional capacities for comparative analysis and to identify possible interregional synergies around specific SCs. This approach could be used in other European countries and at the European level to assess the regional readiness to tackle SCs.

Originality is an important goal of research. However, relatively little is known about the characteristics and motivations of individual researchers or about the facilitating or hindering factors that, in combination, can lead to original research outputs. This is a gap this study aims to fill. Interviews with 20 highly original academics (identified by their peers) active in the field of tourism identify four shared main traits among such researchers—nonconformism, commitment, self-confidence, and interdisciplinarity—and the importance of situational factors. The findings also show that there is no single optimum way of “becoming original” and, therefore, efforts to “replicate” originality may constrain rather than enable originality. From a managerial perspective, this suggests that it is easier to remove barriers than to positively facilitate original research.

The papers included in the SI "Innovation in perihperies and borderlands" highlight the complexity of the connection between innovation and geography. Whilst certain innovation processes seem to be facilitated by cities and by urban proximity, others occur in peripheral and border regions. The ‘slowness’ of peripheral innovation – in particular its heightened reliance on internal capacities, local re-sources and technical information – is confirmed, as is the importance of external connections with actors in other peripheral and border regions as well as with actors in cities. Certain types of innovation, for example exaptation, seem to be more prevalent in peripheral regions where adaptation is not only a necessity but can also be an opportunity. This collection of papers cannot offer any definitive answer to the question of how innovation occurs in peripheries and borderlands: however, not only does it confirm that innovation processes develop in these regions, often in ways that differ from urban regions, it provides a framework for further exploring the question as well as empirical pointers about what to look for. Further studies could build on the papers presented here and elaborate in greater detail: Longer time-series data and larger sets of control variables to establish and confirm causes and effects of innovation in peripheries and borderlands; Mixed-methods research to move forward the dichotomy of the results based on qualitative case studies (providing snapshots) and quantitative samples (providing a general picture); Formally evaluate the impacts of (regional) policies in facilitating in-novation in rural regions; Go beyond the focus on developed countries and explore the patterns of innovation in rural regions of the Global South.

Few studies have researched how the linkages of tourist firms are related to the types of tourism innovation. Therefore, an organizational information processing theory perspective, a case study approach, and a focus group method were adopted in the Pearl River Delta area (China) to discover how different types of firm linkages influence tourism innovation. The findings reveal that tourist firms have four main forms of linkages and that they have differentiated impacts on innovations. Intracompany linkages are beneficial for institutional, managerial, and product innovations; both intercompany and intrasectoral linkages encourage marketing and product innovations, whereas intersectoral linkages facilitate process innovation and product innovation. These findings fill a research gap in the knowledge of firm‐based innovative linkages and explore the importance of linkages between tourism services and tourism manufacturing.

In light of the shortcomings concerning cross-border regional innovation systems (CBRIS), this analysis seeks to propose a new cross-border regional innovation ecosystem (CBRIE) concept better equipped to address the contemporary innovation policy development and practical regional policy challenges on the ground. The existing literature on CBRIS has focused on EU regions and awarded only a marginal role to non-profit organizations (NPO) as potential facilitators of cross-border cooperation (CBC). To address this knowledge gap, the role of NPOs in CBC is analyzed within the bi-national San Diego–Tijuana region at the US-Mexico border. The research follows a mixed approach based on semi-structured interviews and social network analysis in order to: (i) gauge how organizations are interrelated and (ii) identify the key actors within the CBRIE. The results show that the CBRIE concept serves as an effective tool for identifying the organizations involved in cross-border networks and their roles in CBC at the US-Mexico border. Although the US-Mexico border presents stark differences compared to EU border regions, the CBRIE concept can offer a starting point for analyzing and facilitating CBC in Europe.

This work studies the linkages between spatially bound knowledge spillovers, internal research, and innovation (R&I) activities and firm productivity. Spillovers are modeled to emanate from intra- and extra-sectoral R&I activities in the firms’ regional business environments. We specifically test for non-linearities in the complex relationship between these internal and external knowledge sources and quantify their joint marginal effect on firm productivity. Our empirical results for a large panel of German manufacturing firms (1) underline the overall importance of knowledge spillovers in driving productivity and (2) point at distinct interactions between the included knowledge sources: First, we find that intra-sectoral knowledge spillovers only have a statistically significant effect on firm productivity when extra-sectoral spillovers are sufficiently large. Secondly, the link between knowledge spillovers and productivity varies with the level of the firms’ internal R&I activities.

The European Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) with its underlying aim to support regional growth, cohesion, and innovation has by now been widely applied to European Sparsely Populated Areas (SPAs). Previous works have identified that intra-regional stakeholder networks are important for a successful S3 implementation, and that their establishment is related to the level of proximity between stakeholders; however, the nature of such networks in the context of developing S3 in SPAs deserves further investigation. This paper explores how different dimensions of proximity are associated with intra-regional networks aimed at implementing S3 in a Northern European SPA (Lapland, Finland). The results suggest that geographical and cognitive proximity are positively associated with both formal and informal networking, while institutional proximity is negatively related with informal networking, suggesting that effective policy interventions require multiple relationships to be activated through supporting greater diversity between SPAs stakeholders.

In spite of our current understanding of Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) design and implementation, an understanding of interrelated governance practices aimed at addressing S3 governance issues is lacking. Applying a data-triangulation approach to a large peripheral Finnish region (Lapland), the analysis suggests that S3 implementation faces two key challenges: first, the development of stakeholder networks to support diversified specialization; and second, the lack of entrepreneurial discovery activity and associated differentiation of specialization. Policy solutions aimed at successful S3 implementation could focus on more targeted stakeholder engagement to mobilize resources for further diversified specialization.

This paper analyses the determinants of inter-regional innovation cooperation in European knowledge networks. Our main goal is to assess whether structural heterogeneity in the context of the “urban-rural dichotomy” and international borders can explain differences in the regions’ engagement in inter-regional innovation cooperation. We estimate a gravity equation to model innovation cooperation, proxied by inter-regional co-patent applications, as a function of region-specific context conditions as well as technological and geographical distance. Our data comprise dyadic information on 203 NUTS2 regions in 15 European countries (EU-15) for the year 2010. The empirical results show that the basic gravity mechanisms drive the direction and strength of innovation cooperation between EU regions; i.e., geographical distance acts as an impediment to inter-regional co-patent applications. Regarding the importance of structural heterogeneity, we find that pairs of rural regions have lower levels of innovation cooperation compared to urban regions. Similarly, border regions are generally disadvantaged compared to non-border regions in terms of the intensity of innovation cooperation. However, while the latter result points to a negative border effect, our gravity model estimates also show that pairs of border regions are more active in terms of close geographical innovation cooperation (e.g., through international cross-border cooperation), which partly compensates for the negative border effect. This finding not only holds for urban but also rural border regions and may reflect policy attempts to support border regions, e.g., by strengthening the level of international cross-border cooperation within the EU.

Ensuring sustainable transition from more to less polluting technologies has become an area of increasing interest to academics and policymakers alike over the recent years. Environmental innovations play a key role in this transition. Still, to date relatively little empirical research has been undertaken on the topic. This applies particularly to the potential impact of knowledge spillovers stemming from environmental innovation, termed here as environmental knowledge spillovers (ES), on firms' productivity; a research gap explored in this paper. The focus is laid on three economic areas (Europe, Japan and USA), over the period 2002–2017. Additionally, firms' technological diversity, institutional quality, corporate taxes and the stringency of environmental policy are taken into account to estimate their role in facilitating firms' technical efficiency. The findings indicate that ES affect firms' productivity significantly and positively in all the investigated economic areas, whereas technological diversity increases technical efficiency for Japanese and European, but decreases it for American firms. The findings also show how the stringency of environmental policy (positively), institutional quality (positively) and corporate taxes (negatively) affect firms’ technical efficiency.

Smart destinations have become an esteemed concept among researchers and policy makers. Discussion of the concept is optimistic in tone and commonly linked to information rather than knowledge and more to design than innovation, partly explaining relatively limited critical discussion of the (potential) benefits of smart destinations. This article raises selected issues from the innovation, as opposed to the design literature, to offer insightful perspectives on analyzing smart destinations as one manifestation of smart tourism. The discussion emphasises that: 1) smart destinations are driven by uncertainty; 2) knowledge provides deeper insights than information into smart destinations as innovation; 3) entrepreneurs play an important role in facilitating smart destinations; and 4) smart destinations constitute innovation systems.

Cycling tourism has grown in popularity worldwide, motivating its inclusion in the development strategies of tourism organizations. This paper builds an analysis model based on spatial analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition, providing a data-driven way to utilize GPS cycling trajectory data to analyze the spatiotemporal behavior of Chinese cycling tourists using a case study example of the Tibet Autonomous Region. The results show that: (1) The fluctuation of the number of cycling trajectories in Tibet presents multi-modal characteristics, corresponding to fluctuations in China's tourism industry and economy; (2) Cycling tourists in Tibet prefer to use national roads (arguably due to the safety of the road infrastructure and the availability of supporting tourism infrastructure); (3) Cycling tourism is highly concentrated in and around the popular attractions of Tibet. The presented data and methods help to understand the spatiotemporal behavior of cycling tourists, which is of great significance for tourism management.

In this article the distribution and intensity of cross-border cooperation (CBC) networks are tested with primary survey and interview data collected from the Finnish–Russian cross-border region. The study concentrates on the cross-border connectivity of three regionally significant and interlocking sectors (forest, mining and tourism industries together with associated research and administrative organisations) with varying strategies towards natural resource use. The collected data were examined by applying social network analysis tools developed for cross-border contexts. The results depict varying landscapes of CBC depending on the type (firms, research and administrative organisations) of the surveyed actors. Overall the studied CBC network is weakly developed with low firm-level participation and low integration between the sectors – a weakness in the sustainable utilisation of natural resources. Local administrative and research organisations are the network hubs in the studied cross-border...

Given the sheer number of cross-border regions (CBRs) within the EU, their socio-economic importance has been recognized both by policy-makers and academics. Recently, the novel concept of cross-border regional innovation system has been introduced to guide the assessment of integration processes in CBRs. A central focus of this concept is set on analyzing the impact of varying types of proximity (cognitive, technological, etc.) on cross-border cooperation. Previous empirical applications of the concept have, however, relied on individual case studies and varying methodologies, thus complicating and constraining comparisons between different CBRs. Here a broader view is provided by comparing 28 Northern European CBRs. The empirical analysis utilizes economic, science and technology (S&T) statistics to construct proximity indicators and measures S&T integration in the context of cross-border cooperation. The findings from descriptive statistics and exploratory count data regressions show that technological and cognitive proximity measures are significantly related to S&T cooperation activities (cross-border co-publications and co-patents). Taken together, our empirical approach underlines the feasibility of utilizing the proximity approach for comparative analyses in CBR settings.

Whereas interregional networks of individual actors have recently received growing attention, networks in terms of collective regional groups of organisations interacting with their counterparts remain largely ignored. This is surprising given the Smart Specialisation agenda's ‘outward looking’ approach. This conceptual paper explores the rationales and dimensions underpinning interregional knowledge exchange, networks and systems including a definitional clarity, a typology of networks and the impacts of different types of proximity. The paper also introduces the concept of the interregional knowledge exchange system and sets a new agenda for studying their structure, formation and evolutionary path.

We apply panel econometrics to assess the causal linkages between education, research and innovation (R&I) and economic development for EU-28 countries over the time period 1998–2013. Since this period coincides with the biggest enlargement wave in the EU’s history, we particularly aim at identifying the degree of heterogeneity in this nexus between and within the groups of old (EU-15) and new member states (NMS-13). Our empirical results support the view that education- and R&I-driven economic development varies considerably by country groups and individual countries in the long and short run. As such, we get empirical support for a longrun ‘innovation paradox’ for the EU-15, while we find evidence for education-led economic development in EU-15 countries. Contrarily, for the NMS-13, R&I activities are identified as significant driver of economic development in the long and short run, whereas the link between education and economic development is found to be limited here. The application of poolability tests further shows that NMS-13 countries are more heterogeneous and clustered into sub-groups compared to the economic behaviour of EU-15 countries. The revealed patterns call for a careful reflexion of the current education and R&I policy practice at the EU level to account for prevailing heterogeneities across countries and country groups.

This paper explores the collaboration networks of Finnish metal music genre superstars, the evolution of these networks through time, and the importance of geographical scale in their evolution. The article, therefore, aims to shed light upon how successful creative teams network: locally (local buzz) and/or globally (global pipelines). The contemporary literature on economic geography underlines the importance of the local scene and of geographical proximity for the creative industries, such as the music industry. The illustrative cases presented here – considered to be superstars in terms of their record sales – provide evidence that if local networks and buzz are present in the home localities of the bands, as is common in urban environments, they take advantage of these collaboration possibilities. However, bands located in smaller more peripheral localities can substitute for the lack of local buzz with global pipelines. Consequently, the results suggest that, for successful bands, the importance of local buzz is not as marked as would be expected based on the earlier literature. Therefore, the findings challenge, at least to a certain degree, the views of the heightened importance of geographical proximity for the creative music industry: instead, superstars collaborate to a large extent through global pipelines.

Innovation has long been considered one of the key engines of economic growth, and patents as important incentives for research and development activity. Particularly in terms of intellectual property rights (IPR), however, little is known about how cities contribute to regional innovation: are they containers, facilitators or innovators? This is investigated here through empirical material derived from 27 interviews with top departmental management in three Finnish cities (Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa). The results show that local city governments (LCGs) consider cities as facilitators of innovation activities but also admit that there are limits (time constraints and lack of resources) to the influence of LCGs over the innovation environment. Still, many of the public sector innovations (especially social innovations) that do not necessarily have a clear market potential would not have been created without the active role of LCGs as innovators. City employees are innovative – the seeming lack of public sector innovation is actually a result of measurement issues that favour (patentable) technological innovations rather than those more common to LCGs, meaning service and organisational types. Therefore, LCGs can be seen as highly innovative organisations. There are, however, barriers to innovation in the public sector, such as the cost of innovation activity, the lack of incentives for it and a working culture that does not support it. Lastly, the results show that LCGs have not really fully considered the possibilities and potential of owning their own IPR; to be specific, potentially lucrative opportunities should be explored.

Originality is an essential element of academic research and the peer review system plays a key gatekeeping role in its acceptance. However, there is no consensus as to the precise definition of the concept, its measurement nor the importance attached to it. Primary data from 26 interviews with editors or editorial board members of top ranking tourism journals inform a discussion of the nuanced understanding of the concept and of how different levels of originality (radical vs. incremental), among other peer review assessment criteria, influence tourism publication. Finally, the main challenges relating to recognising originality in the peer review process are identified leading to recommendations for improvements to how originality is assessed.

[EN] For a long time, the measurement of innovation has been at the forefront of policymakers' and researchers' agenda worldwide. Therefore, there is an ongoing debate about which indicators should be used to measure innovation. Recent approaches have favoured the use of composite innovation indicators. The European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) is a relevant tool for benchmarking innovation in Europe. Still, the EIS lacks a proper scheme for weighting the included indicators according to their relative importance. Moreover, despite there is a consensus on the importance of interaction between different dimensions of innovation, there is no composite indicator taking into account of this. We propose an appraisal methodology permitting to take into consideration the interaction of dimensions to be aggregated and robustness concerns related to the elicitation of the weights assigned to the elementary indicators structured in a hierarchical way. With this aim, we apply a multiple-criteria decision-making approach being the conjunction of three methodologies, namely, the multiple-criteria hierarchy process, the Choquet integral and the stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis. It helps the users to rank and benchmark countries' innovation performance at partial and global level taking into account the importance and interaction of dimensions as well as robustness concerns., Salvatore Corrente and Salvatore Greco acknowledge: Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universitá e della Ricerca (MIUR)-PRIN 2017, project "Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis and Multiple Criteria Decision Theory".

Spatial patterns of tourist flows represent the movement of tourists and show differences in tourism resources giving advice for promoting balanced and sustainable tourism development. This paper proposes a novel framework for analyzing these patterns based on tourists' digital footprint data collected from online travel diaries. Based on illustrative case study data from Qingdao (China), the framework, combining traditional quantitative and social network analysis, is able to pinpoint: (1) The influence of distance decay and attractions’ popularity on the spatial patterns of tourist flows; (2) The uneven distribution of the core tourist nodes and the existence of the structural hole phenomenon, which form a network pattern with unbalanced power and intense internal competition; (3) The formation of the core area for tourism along the coastline – as is typical for coastal tourism cities. This difference of tourism resources between coastal and inland areas, thus, remains a challenge for future tourism development in Qingdao.

The importance of inter-regional co-operation and innovation are widely accepted in the development rhetoric of the European Union. The highlighted importance of both themes in the context of borderlands has recently led to the coining of a new concept, cross-border regional innovation system. However, little attention has been given to the empirical analysis of the concept. This paper suggests a framework for empirically validating the concept by examining the levels of integration between cross-border regions. The outcome is a proposed framework that can be operationalised by measurable indicators of cross-border co-operation in a regional innovation system setting. The framework was further tested with illustrative empirical cases that demonstrate its feasibility.

Geo-located travel blogs, a new data source, enable to achieve more detailed analysis of tourists' spatio-temporal behavior. Taking Chinese tourists in Nordic countries as the research object, this paper focuses on their behavior, seasonal patterns and complex network effects by using geo-located travel blog data collected from Qunar.com. The results show that: (1) Chinese tourists visiting Nordic countries are often experienced in traveling. The local climate during the cold season does not prevent them from pursuing the aurora scenery. (2) The travel behavior of Chinese tourists is spatially heterogeneous. The network analysis reveals that Iceland showcases stronger, compared to the other Nordic countries, community independence and small world effect. (3) During the warm season, Chinese tourists choose a variety of destinations, while in cold season, they tend to choose destinations with higher chances for spotting the northern lights. These results provide helpful information for the tourism management departments of Nordic countries to improve their marketing and development efforts directed for Chinese tourists., Highlights • Focus is laid on the behavior of Chinese tourists in Nordic countries. • Complex network theory is introduced to explore the flow patterns of tourists. • Scale-free and small world effects are observed in the tourist flow network. • There is no obvious tourism off-season in Nordic countries due to “aurora chasers”.

Knowledge on spatio-temporal changes of inbound tourism flow is important for destination economy, cultural communication and city image. This paper proposes a novel research framework for the spatio-temporal distribution and changes of inbound tourism flow by, first, using R-HDBSCAN clustering algorithm to extract tourism area of interest (AOI), second, by utilizing several key indicators adopted from the complex network theory literature to study the structure of inbound tourism flow with a case study example from Shanghai, China. The results show, first, that tourism in Shanghai is highly concentrated on the most popular AOI clustered in the city center relatively close to each other and, second, that, the inbound tourism flow network of Shanghai has small-world characteristics, while the distribution of its AOI (nodes) and tourist routes (edges) has general power law features, which has been influenced by the World Expo.

Open innovation platforms (OIPs) have been described as a new generation of co-creation spaces that enable the different actors of the innovation ecosystem to interact with each other and to facilitate user-driven innovation. Here the utility of OIPs was scrutinised with two case study examples: one from South Korea and one from Finland. In the two cases, OIPs provide a problem-solving cooperative model that gives young innovators authority promoting their transformation from users into producers and co-creators of innovative products and services. Moreover, OIPs play a key role in the innovation ecosystem by facilitating collaboration, diversity and social sustainability. The two cases are, however, very different in terms of transferability. While the Korean OIP is motivated to maintain its long-term investments in one region but less inspired to relocate and spread its success model to other regions, the Finnish OIP has expanded internationally to several other countries.