European innovative regions

A regional market survey in 10 countries

IADP-partners: Caudata & Zjak Consult

This research focuses on Western European countries. The geographical scale of the analysis is the so-called NUTS-2 regions within these countries. Since we want to get a picture of the innovation power in a comprehensive area, this level seems to be sufficiently detailed. The total number of regions studied is 133.

The research focuses on describing the regional qualities of the Western European knowledge economy. The starting point here is that data on innovative strength and employment trends in higher education jobs can be an important indicator of investment opportunities in R&D real estate (although this of course also depends on current and future supply). For the detailing of regional qualities, available (and comparable) statistics from Eurostat were used. This analysis falls into two parts. First, we look at the innovation strength of the firms and institutions in a region and how it has developed in recent years. Second, we have assumed that the level of employment and its development is an indicator of R&D-related demand for real estate.

Particular attention was paid to workers in medium- and high-tech manufacturing and in knowledge-intensive services.
During the analysis, we varied the weight of the variables to see what the effect of a different approach might be. It turned out that the results were very robust. Different methods showed broadly similar results.