This report was produced by the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities (CFE) led by Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, Director. It is part of the Programme of Work of the OECD’s Regional Development Policy Committee (RDPC).
The report is the outcome of five high-level expert workshops organised in 2018 by the OECD and the European Commission (EC) at the OECD Headquarters in Paris, within the framework of the Broadening Innovation Policy: New Insights for Cities and Regions project. The financial contributions from the EC’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy and its support, in particular from Peter Berkowitz, Richard Deiss, Denisa Perrin and Marek Przeor, are gratefully acknowledged.
The OECD Secretariat would particularly like to thank the experts who wrote the background papers for each workshop: David Audretsch, Patrizio Bianchi, Jennifer Clark, Riccardo Crescenzi, Oliver Harman, Thomas R. Howell, Pantelis Koutroumpis, Sandrine Labory, François Lafond, Kevin Morgan, Charles W. Wessner and David A. Wolfe. The papers are available in their entirety online. The team would also like to thank the participants of the five workshops, during which a number of experts and country representatives contributed their perspectives to inform this report.
The workshops and final publication were co‑ordinated by Alexander C. Lembcke under the supervision of Rudiger Ahrend, Head of Division, Economic Analysis, Statistics and Multi-level Governance in CFE. The chapters build on the background papers prepared by experts as well as on the workshop discussions. The chapters were finalised by Alexander C. Lembcke (Chapters 1-4) and Sandra Hannig (Chapter 5) based on initial drafts by Diogo Machado. Nikolina Jonsson, Talia Kaufmann, Diogo Machado, Spencer McMurray and Charles Victor supported the organisation of the 5 workshops for which Enrique Garcilazo (Workshop 1), Alexander C. Lembcke (Workshop 2), Abel Schumann (Workshops 3 and 4) and Dorothée Allain-Dupré (Workshop 5) were responsible.
Thanks are also due to Alexandra Taylor for editorial inputs, Eleonore Morena for editorial assistance and formatting the manuscript and to Pilar Philip who guided the preparation of the final publication.
This final publication was approved by the Regional Development Policy Committee through a written procedure on 24 September 2020 (CFE/RDPC(2020)13).