Focus 4

Impact of research infrastructures on regional creativity

The issue concerning the extent to which RIs significantly stimulate S&T creativity is of special interest. Novelty and creativity are usually supposed to emerge through the combination of distinct and complementary knowledge bases. This work package is focused more specifically on the benefits of RIs on creativity at regional level, that is beyond the community of researchers stricto sensu.

The mere presence of a RI and hence of a concentration of "knowledge workers" in a given region may in fact exert a positive influence on the creativity of companies located in the neighbourhood and more generally on the whole local economy. Boosting networks and creativity concerns S&T agents directly involved in RIs (operating most of the time at the international scale) as well as more peripheral, industrial and economic agents operating in the regional sphere.

In order to investigate the hypothesis of an impact of RIs on creativity at regional level, this work package will conduct two complementary lines of work: (1) an analysis of the impact of RIs as they are defined by the EU; and (2) a comparison with a regional based infrastructure.

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