Regardless of the top rated R&D investments in Finland, the innovation processes do not sufficiently support innovation generation. Thus, the biggest challenge of the current innovation activity in Finland is not to strengthen the R&D investments, but to ensure the emergence of the exploitable, commercial innovations. Moreover, the current innovation studies emphasize the importance of the problem based interfaces of different expertise areas in the successful innovation processes. However, the foci of the national and regional innovation policies are still firmly in strengthening the research infrastructure and research-based innovations.

Among the large city regions of Finland, Lahti is the only one without its own university. The local R&D investments are low in comparison to the other city regions. During the last years, Lahti Region has strongly invested in developing an innovation policy exploiting the characteristics of the region: its firm industrial heritage, closeness of several large research centres, and the multi-actor, networked structure of the region's innovation environment. A new kind of regional innovation policy model has been developed, grounded on the idea of practice-based innovation activity and network-facilitating innovation policy supporting it. In the model, the focus of innovation policy is, rather than on developing the region's own research infrastructure, on the enhancement of practice-based innovation processes and on linking the global research bases into these processes.

Harmaakorpi, V. (2006, forthcoming). The Regional Development Method as a Tool for Regional Innovation Policy. European Planning Studies. Accepted to be published in 2006.

Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lahti Unit
Professor Vesa Harmaakorpi

01/05/2005

policy

Urban Policy > Economy knowledge & employment > Research & innovation

Implementation & production