The Swedish System of Innovation: Regional Synergies in a Knowledge-Based Economy

TL;DR

This study analyzes regional and national innovation synergies in Sweden using mutual information across geographical, technological, and organizational dimensions, revealing significant contributions from metropolitan regions and validating a novel quantitative measure.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative measure of innovation synergy based on mutual information and applies it to the Swedish system, highlighting regional contributions and validating its use in other contexts.

Findings

48.5% of regional synergy from Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö/Lund

Sweden is a centralized, hierarchical innovation system

The Triple Helix indicator effectively measures innovation synergy

Abstract

Based on the complete set of firm data for Sweden (N = 1,187,421; November 2011), we analyze the mutual information among the geographical, technological, and organizational distributions in terms of synergies at regional and national levels. Mutual information in three dimensions can become negative and thus indicate a net export of uncertainty by a system or, in other words, synergy in how knowledge functions are distributed over the carriers. Aggregation at the regional level (NUTS3) of the data organized at the municipal level (NUTS5) shows that 48.5% of the regional synergy is provided by the three metropolitan regions of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malm\"o/Lund. Sweden can be considered as a centralized and hierarchically organized system. Our results accord with other statistics, but this Triple Helix indicator measures synergy more specifically and quantitatively. The analysis also provides us with validation for using this measure in previous studies of more regionalized systems of innovation (such as Hungary and Norway).