Regional Systems of Innovation: a Literature Review

Though various authors have offered reviews of the Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) literature and some have described their personal intellectual voyage amongst the building blocks that constitute this area of scientific enquiry (for example, Cooke 2008), these often illuminating illustrations are nonetheless subjective and, thus, suffer from biases which pertain to the actor performing the analysis. The study proposed in this paper aims to overcome the aforementioned limitation by elaborating an objective review of the main contributions to the RIS field of research, highlighting the main themes studied and the principal approaches followed. The analysis has been conducted following the Author Co-citation method, applied to the literature regarding RIS present in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) of Thomson-ISI in the time span from 1990 to 2009. The results allow to trace an overview of how the RIS research area is actually composed, identifying six main research themes which characterize the field and varied approaches according to which each theme has been analyzed. Main contributions are positioned against each other in order to foster an increase in efforts from future research.