Innovation and Change in Baden-Württemberg's Regional Innovation System

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Economics - Innovation economics, grade: 2,0, Lund University (CIRCLE Institute), language: English, abstract: Globalization pushed regions on the market of global competition. Each of them tries to fulfill the needs of companies, tries to surround all actors with a reliable innovation system, tailored to the needs of their economy. The federal state of Baden-Württemberg (BW) in Germany is one of them. BW has been in the focus for its outstanding performance in the sectors of mature industries in the past. Nowadays the former successful region has to adapt to the sectors of high-technologies. Several concepts, such as RIS, lock-in, pathdependency, variety and specialization, are applied to the region to see how it has changed. It is questioned if BW was able to avoid stagnation and lock-in in the past and if it transformed its regional innovation system to a higher level. Surprisingly, the results show that BW was indeed able to fulfill the needs of high-tech sectors to a certain degree by further engaging R&D, and transforming the educational base. Key Words: Regional Innovation Systems, Baden-Württemberg, mature industries, hightechnology sectors