Accessibility has for many years been a widely used tool in transportation research. Many definitions have been suggested and researchers have constructed numerous mathematical formulations to measure its value in order to be able to evaluate the relationships between the nature of the transport systems and the patterns of land use. Such correlations have been used especially in assessing existing transport systems and forecasting their performance to provide decision-makers with ideas about the need for investments in the transport systems. However, accessibility measures can be regarded as the spatial counterparts of discounting. The measures represent the spatial distribution of economic agents and their activities in a simple way that imposes a very clear structure upon the relationship between these agents and their activities and their environment. Various frictional effects arising from geographical distance between economic agents determine their interaction options, that is, their options to trade, to cooperate, to learn, to commute, and so on. Observing that the time sensitivities of the economic agents vary between different spatial scales (and between different economic activities) we may impose a spatial structure (for example, local, intra-regional, interregional and international) which offers opportunities to define variables in such a way that spatial dependencies can be accommodated. These newly defined variables can then be used in empirical explanations of various spatial phenomena, such as patent output, new firm formation, the emergence of new export products, and economic growth in different spatial units. We will in this chapter against this background show that accessibility is an underused analytical and empirical tool in regional science with an underestimated potential.

Developed countries must be incredibly innovative to secure incomes and welfare so that they may successfully compete against international rivals. This book focuses on two specific but interrelated aspects of innovation by incumbent firms and entrepreneurs, the role of geography and of open innovation.

This book highlights the role of entrepreneurship, social capital and governance for regional economic development. In recent decades, many researchers have claimed that entrepreneurship is the most critical factor in sustaining regional economic growth. However, most entrepreneurship research is undertaken without considering the fundamental importance of the regional context. Other research has emphasized the role of social capital but there are substantial problems in empirically relating measures of social capital to regional economic development. © Charlie Karlsson, Börje Johansson and Roger R. Stough 2012. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we give a general introduction to the notion of entrepreneurship and how it has many complex meanings. Entrepreneurs in new firms but also in incumbent firms have a key role in local, regional and national economic development by taking risks to get things done by developing new combinations of ideas and/or doing things differently. In view of this, two of the main questions that are dealt with are: (1) which features make structural differences in institutions and innovation networks remain invariant between decades, and (2) how knowledge about such features can be employed in policy at the national and the regional level. The research questions highlighted in this special issue relate to many pertinent national and regional policy issues. The most apparent concerns conditions conducive for entrepreneurship in the form of new firms and firm growth. In this paper, we also introduce the different contributors to this special issue.

Regional economic development has experienced considerable dynamism over the recent past. Perhaps the most stunning cases are China and India rising to emergent country status by the turn of the millennium, when most development economists believed in the mid to late twentieth century that such developments could not and would never occur. Paralleling these developments are similar stories of rapid growth at both the national (for example, the four little dragons-Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan; and also Malaysia and Brazil) and the sub-national regional level, which are elaborated on below. With time now for hindsight, some of the reasons these development successes are beginning to emerge are becoming known. The four little dragons' success is tied to what has come to be known as export-dominated development. By focusing on sizeable export markets for non-durable and to some extent durable goods at first and then later, on durables coupled with disciplined, educated and educable labor forces, these countries rose to developed status by the closing decade of the twentieth century. While all of this was going on, new thinking about economic growth-such as the 'new growth theory', along with recognition of emerging patterns of change such as agglomeration, clustering and entrepreneurship-began to modify the quasi-static development views of the neo-classical perspective on economic growth that had changed little since the 1950s following the work of Solow.

This chapter provides a theoretically informed discussion of creativity in social capital and elaborates on its role in economic growth and development based on recent theoretical developments in evolutionary economics and economic geography. We discuss social capital as an explanatory factor for creativity and creative processes in the short run, but also creativity as a factor having impacts on social networks, norms and values in the long run. The theoretical discussions are complemented with empirical illustrations and examples. Our starting point is that creativity has both an individual and a collective component, which are both linked to social capital.