COVID-Disrupted Regional Innovation Ecosystems

The COVID pandemic continues to create the biggest revolution in the organisation of knowledge-intensive work since the industrial revolution, impacting all European regions. Many knowledge workers - the major driver of innovation - in companies, research centres and universities no longer work together in teams in the same region or building. Many work from home in "distributed teams" and often in different regions and cities. The issue addressed by the CODIL project is that this development has far-reaching implications for the traditional "place-based" regional innovation value chain that has successfully produced start-ups, high-growth companies, regional clusters and key sectors. The project's overall objective, therefore, is to enable participating regions to adapt their innovation policy instruments to better support this emerging distributed-team innovation model and its key component, highly skilled mobile knowledge workers. Adaption requires a policy review of: Competence of the region in key disruptive technologies enabling this new innovation model (e.g., Al or cybersecurity): Place-based and societal factors such as environment, lifestyle, community and the availability of family-friendly services; Fiscal incentives for knowledge workers and companies; Innovation support to less knowledge intensive sectors; Availability of suitable innovation spaces; Knowledge transfer interfaces from universities; Potential to support inclusion of marginalised groups into the innovation process.