Policy perspectives

Abstract

Innovation has always spanned countries and continents. At the turn of the 20th century, the Wright brothers in the United States of America (U.S.) and Alberto Santos-Dumont in Brazil invented the first airplanes to fly successfully. Yet, the development of the modern airplane owes much to scientific advances in Europe that explained why heavier-than-air machines could fly.1 The development and dissemination of the agricultural technologies that unleashed the green revolution after the Second World War relied on partnerships between the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in the U.S. and a large number of agricultural research institutes in developing economies.2 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) – a research consortium on the Franco–Swiss border sponsored by 23 (mostly) European countries.3 As documented in this report, innovation today is both highly localized and international at the same time. Different agglomeration forces have favored the formation of innovation hotspots that typically fall within large metropolitan regions. A limited set of hotspots lead the way and are at the center of global innovation networks. Various formal and informal links connect the nodes of these networks, with multinational companies playing a key role within them. Evidence from patent and scientific publication records suggests that the cross­border dimension of these links has increased over the past decades.