Keywords

1.1 The Emergence of the Concept

The notion of resilience emerges as a possibility to comprehend how different systems deal with shocks. It raises important issues regarding public policies and socioeconomic programs. Resilience has obtained a considerable degree of attention over the last years.

The concept recalls the vision of physics and natural sciences, referring to the stability of materials, its resistance to external shocks, and the capacity of the system of returning to the pre-shock state after suffering the impact. During the 1970s, Holling published an influential work in which he applied the concept of resilience to ecosystems, focusing on a system’s ability to absorb shocks and retain structural functions. Holling understood resilience as a measure of the persistence of systems and the ability to absorb change and disturbance while maintaining relationships between populations or governmental variables.

Recently, however, resilience has become a more prominent term, mainly due to the financial and economic crisis, which has resulted in an understanding of the concept that goes beyond the strictly ecological aspects; resilience has gained a more socioeconomic character. In this last case, a robust system is one that can withstand strenuous system-shocks and re-stabilize itself, despite not precisely at the same equilibrium point as the status quo before. The problem with this definition is that, by considering merely equilibrium, resilience will always revolve around getting back to a specific trajectory or point without taking into consideration alternative pathways or, in other words: adaptation, change, and evolution. This is the reason why many authors do not rely on this meaning of resilience. They prefer to emphasize the evolutionary, multi-equilibrium perspective that allows systems to recover from shocks, not by only by going back to the previous states, but also by creating new alternatives.

The evolutionary approach to regional resilience focuses on the long-term capacity of regions to deal with shocks. It can be said that, in an evolutionary framework, resilience is not a mere property or goal, but rather an on-going process. Evolutionary resilience admits that often a regional economy, as a complex adaptive system, cannot return to the state it was before the shock in some instances. In such cases, a new point of equilibrium must be found, and preferably one that could be as efficient or, if possible, even more advantageous than the former. Inspired by this evolutionary perspective, an entirely new area of research on resilience begins to emerge in socioeconomic studies.

1.2 Pioneering Work on Resilience in Psychology

Most of the pioneering work related to social sciences, as highly complex systems, had its very origin on the more recent developments made by psychologists. In the scientific field, the concept reports a specific kind of strength originated by fragility and becomes a vibrant and promissory concept for social sciences in which marginal, deprived social contexts, struggling for survival, can find tools to grow and survive the competition.

To advance a research agenda for resilience and innovation, we first justify the goal of this book with so many contributions from sociologists and economists. A view over some facts related to the psychological approach of resilience are provided, and parallelism of those with the social context is conducted.

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist, studied large samples of children for decades’, observing how, in some cases, they excel regardless of the difficult circumstances they were exposed to. His primary goal was to focus on schools from economically depressed areas and to search for adaptive and successful children, despite difficult backgrounds.

Resilience offers a strange challenge: it is not an attribute evaluated on any test. It evolves as life reveals. If no adversity occurs, it will not be possible to detect how resilient one is. It is only when confronted with hindrances, obstacles or environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges.

Along the several decades and studies related to psychological resilience, some direct causes for resilience have been identified: individual, psychological factors (reflecting some disposition and external) and environmental factors, which are more related to a random set of circumstances.

In 1982 and 2001, Emmy Werner discussed and published the results of a 30 year long project, allowing the identification of several factors of resilience out of the analysed data. These factors were related to chance and psychology: those more resilient detained an “internal locus of control” and trusted that only themselves could affect their achievements as creators of their opportunities. It was furthered that resilience was a dynamic concept, strongly temporal, and its changes over time nurtured the individual breaking points and skills, leading to unstable outcomes. These conclusions became beneficial results for social sciences in general, indicating not only that resilience is a dynamic concept, variable over multiple and strong stressors, but also that resilience can be acquired as a skill.

Later, Bonanno et al. (2007) emphasized adversity as to better formulate his theory of resilience utilizing the fundamentals of the stress-response system (a response to millions of years of animal evolution). If most of the people can make good use of that system to deal with stress, why do some use it more frequently or efficiently than others? As it seems, living through adversity, be it of endemic or of environmental nature, or through an acute negative event, does not guarantee that one will suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing or not.

Nonetheless, the most important remarks from the previous studies emphasize that positive attitudes can be taught by training people to regulate emotions in a long-lasting form better. In this sense, the research of Seligman (2011) shows that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external, from global to specific, and from permanent to impermanent made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. Also, the locus of control can change from external to internal, leading to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance.

To summarize, those cognitive skills that underpin resilience at individual levels can be learned over time, may create resilience where there was none, also working in the opposite direction, thereby threatening defense mechanisms and negatively affecting stability. From this short review over the roots of the concept of resilience we, as social scientists, must retain that there exists a set of skills that, although variable in time and space, can be identified and, if need be, integrated into an increasingly complex system—in our case, a social-economic system.

Facing a strong financial and economic crisis since 2008, it is not surprising that resilience rose to prominence in our field of research during the last decade. Social scientists go beyond a strictly ecological understanding of resiliency and define a resilient socio-economic system as a robust system that can withstand serious system-shocks and re-stabilize itself, albeit not exactly at the same equilibrium point as the status quo before.

Just like in the case of individual resilience in the psychological approach, the evolutionary approach to regional resilience focuses on the long-term capacity of regions to deal with shocks. A system’s resilience depends not only on the capacity to recover, but to change, learn and prevent similar shocks in the future. Resilience is understood as the capacity to sustain long-term development and to respond positively to short-term shocks—it is an on-going process.

This very simplistic approach reveals the major goals of the present publication: To propose to intertwine resilience and innovation and to further design a research agenda covering the following major topics:

  • Theoretical contributions towards the integration of resilience, innovation, and regional science

  • Empirical studies focusing the conditions for resilient territories

  • Smart specialization and innovation

  • Impacts of resilience in regional development

  • Clustering dynamics, and resilience

  • Comparative studies on institutional factors that shape resilience

  • Policies implemented in resilient territories

1.3 Towards the Geographies of Resilience: The Case of Europe

Europe has been facing a long-standing crisis over the last years. Beginning in 2007, this crisis has been described as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Based on Eurostat data regarding the change of GDP, unemployment rate, and R&D expenditure at NUTS 2 level, and comparing the performances across EU regions, we can confirm that, in terms of GDP, between 2008 and 2013, Southern European regions and the United Kingdom registered the most negative variations. Netherlands, Finland, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, and Spain faced the worst situations. The interior regions of France and some parts of Sweden also had a negative economic growth, although to a lesser extent than the cases mentioned before. Conversely, the regions of Eastern Europe, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, and some French regions had grown. The most noticeable pattern visible is that the regions of southern Europe suffered more, even if some countries such as the United Kingdom and Finland have had a negative performance as well.

Further conclusions based on the data show the changes to the unemployment rate, between 2009 and 2014, similar to some extent to those verified with the GPD changes. The regions from Southern Europe remain the ones in the worst situation, the case of Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. France has mixed results, with the central regions having the worst performances. Netherlands and Bulgaria are close to Mediterranean countries in terms of performances, and Poland has mixed results. United Kingdom has different results regarding unemployment comparing with GDP. Overall, the northern and central European regions made considerably better than other regions. If we consider the changes in investment in R&D between 2007 and 2012, most EU regions did not perform cuts on the domestic expenses on research and development during the selected period.

The only countries with regions that registered cuts in R&D were the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Sweden and Finland, with the latter being the only country to register cuts in all its regions. Besides the particular regions of the aforementioned countries, many regions in the EU increased their expenditure in R&D, with the regions of Central and Eastern Europe showing the biggest increases. It is also worth mentioning that, while there is a degree of contrast between Southern and Northern Europe, in the sense that the Southern countries invested less than the Northern ones, this gap is relatively smaller than in both previous cases.

As we illustrate the different regional capacities of coping with the crisis, we must confirm the importance of resilience to surmount difficulties and better manage shortages in capital availabilities. These maps visualize the reality that some countries and groups of countries were/have been more resilient regarding the adaptation of production and employment to the crisis than others. The fact that there is not a clear pattern regarding R&D change may induce the conclusion that many different factors besides R&D may be able to determine the resilience capacity of regions and countries. For example, in the conclusion of this book, we observe the surprising revival of the Portuguese economy, whose GDP growth rate grew, against all the expectations, from −4%, in 2012, to +1.6%, in 2015.

1.4 Organization of the Book

This book collected a group of contributions from the fields of Regional Science, Economics of Innovation, Science and Technology Studies, and Planning, thus comprehending a multidisciplinary approach in both theoretical and methodological contexts.

So far, few books have dedicated specific attention to the intersection between innovation and resilience. In this case, we have organized this publication into five major parts:

Chapter 1—The introduction of the book Hugo Pinto and Teresa Noronha, revisit the pilot concepts of resilience mainly from a socioeconomic and psychological perspective. Thereby, they supply a bridging understanding into its most recent use by the social sciences. A discussion on the emergency of the concepts related to resilience is supplied as much as the variety of forms to observe it is explored. Further, maps are used to ullustrate some of the variables closely related to resilience in Europe.

Part I of the book entitled Theoretical Foundations comprehends a theoretical framing on which most of the chapter relies. This part is very useful to consolidate the still embryonic concept of resilience when applied to Social Sciences.

Chapter 2 “Evolutionary Complexity Geography and the Future of Regional Innovation and Growth Policies” authored by Philip Cooke, emphasizes the complexity and how the evolutionary perspective may shift the scope of regional innovation and growth. By reviewing some key conceptual and practical barriers that have hampered territorial, economic development prospects in most advanced countries for some time, the author searches for a great escape from cognitive and policy “lock-in” situations. A brief review of evolutionary economic geography (EEG), refashioned as evolutionary complexity geography (ECG) is made.

Chapter 3 “Evolutionary Resilience Shifting Territorial Development Paradigms” by Carlos Gonçalves continues adds foundational understanding to concepts of evolutionary resilience demonstrating the recurrence of crises in the contemporary societies and conferring centrality to evolutionary resilience, also by resuming pre-crisis trajectory.

Part II refers to the Multilevel Aspects of Resilience and includes a set of four chapters highlighting empirical findings from an extensive international basis and helping claim for the multi-level character of resilience. This we understand to be the most pioneering aspect of our research agenda.

Chapter 4 “Economic Crisis, Turbulence and the Resilience of Innovation: Insights from the Atlantic Maritime Cluster” by Hugo Pinto, Elvira Uyarra, Mercedes Bleda and Helena Almeida suggests the notion of ‘resilience of innovation’ as the capacity of an innovation process to maintain its function at different levels of operation.

In Chap. 5 “Innovation, Regions and Employment Resilience in Sweden” Charlie Karlsson and Philippe Rouchy adopt a mixed approach of resilience associating economic geography with labour capital, applying it to a sample of Swedish regions from the perspective of labour accessibility, performance, and dynamics.

In Chap. 6 “Diversifying Mediterranean Tourism as a Strategy of Regional Resilience Enhancement”, André Samora-Arvela, Eric Vaz, João Ferrão, Jorge Ferreira, and Thomas Panagopoulos assess local resilience for the tourism industry, addressing future challenges of the industry in regards to environmental degradation and climate change.

Part III focuses on a possible research trend Towards Strategies for Resilience that emerges from the three sequential chapters:

Davide Fassi and Carla Sedini focus, in Chap. 7 “Design Solutions for Resilience” on the methods and tools which are typical to design processes and put in place strategies to improve the quality of life of neighbourhoods. Many intangible elements do well with social capital and therefore must be considered to design methods that are very useful in highlighting and explaining some social contexts. Narratives, participation, co-design are suitable approaches to create and make visible connections which can help resilience to be improved. Such design tools do not only ease the success of projects but also involve institutions and citizens.

Sandro Guduchi and Manuel Fernández-Esquinas Chap. 8 “Organisational innovations for science-industry interactions: the emergence of collaborative research centres in Spanish regional innovation systems” suggest that the creation and diffusion of organizational innovations for knowledge transfer in regional innovation systems is a phenomenon relevant to the understanding the innovative dynamics associated with regional resilience. They argue that the collaboration between the scientific and industrial sectors is of critical relevance. This chapter analyses the specific case of organizational innovations of the collaborative research centres (CRCs) in Spain constituted by the joint participation of scientific, government, and industrial agents to increase the technical, scientific capacities of the territory and guiding them towards strategic sectors for the development of the productive system.

Within the same frame of understanding, in Chap. 9 “Merging entropy in self-organization: a geographical approach” Eric Vaz and Dragos Bandur propose the integration of innovative spatial analytical methods to measure self-organization spatial phenomena at the regional level, suggesting that machine learning may have a significant impact on using concepts of entropy for novel techniques of clustering and classification, important assets to support regional decision making.

The next and final, Part IV, Resilience, and Innovation fine tunes the concept of resilience while intertwining it with innovation, technological or organizational, and bringing to light a new conceptual basis of increasing resilience based upon new attitudes, materials, strategies.

Chapter 10 “Innovative Urban Paradigms for Sustainability and Resilience” by Manuela Pires Rosa, supplies an extensive set of social and cultural advances which imply deep changes in urban paradigms, namely in the areas of land use, transportation and water planning and management. She explains how some innovative approaches in the field may contribute to reduce the vulnerability of the territories, to conserve natural resources, and to avoid environmental pollution, making them able to develop collaborative and adaptive management processes that are therefore more resilient.

In Chap. 11 “Innovation as Transformation: Integrating the Socio-Ecological Perspectives of Resilience and Sustainability” Karl Bruckmeier and Iva Miranda Pires connect the concepts of social and ecological resilience and sustainability to develop an integrated perspective of innovation. They discuss possible combinations of resilience and sustainability concerning innovation, adaptation, and transformation for local strategies for urban-rural development in metropolitan areas and their surroundings. The analysis is illustrated with studies of agricultural development in peri-urban and urban areas where the interaction of urban and rural development increases the difficulties of transformation to sustainability.

Finally, as a contribution to this conceptually new approach, in Chap. 12 “Territorial Innovation Models: Which Consequences regarding Policy Design for Peripheral Regions? A Portuguese Perspective” Domingos Santos’s chapter main objectives are to discuss those theoretical frameworks that may enable a better understanding of the relationship innovation-territory, analyzing the characteristics of the Portuguese context and, finally, the main implications in the design and implementation of territorially embedded innovation.

1.5 Final Remarks

As we know, several countries across the world and some European regions have experienced a rise in unemployment and reduction of economic growth suffered as a result of the economic crisis. Such problems seem to subsist, which negatively impacts some regions more than others, damaging the normal economic turbulence, the innovative dynamics of the territories, and the consequent asymmetric effects upon European regions. Thus, investigating how resilient the innovation process to crises has been is worthy of attention. This research helps us better understand the capacity of the innovation systems to resist and adapt to disruptions such as the ones generated by economic downturns.

As seen, resilience encompasses many dimensions, which often transcend the simple measures of product or employment growth. Research and innovation strategies (RIS3) for smart specialization, as well as focused S&T and innovation may make a significant contribution towards more resilient territories in the European regional policy context.

This book discusses how innovation may help to configure a new regional institutional framework oriented to a smart specialization that takes into account the resilience of territories and regions. At the same time, it also analyses methods emphasizing that institutional diversity and integration may promote more business discoveries, spillovers and agglomeration efficiencies that not only ease structural change in regions but also help to construct resilience.

Working to establish a new, more complete definition of resilience and innovation will bring a positive contribution to regional science overall, but this body of work is particularly addressed to policymakers, to regional authorities dealing with regional governance and development strategies, and to those responsible for risk management, at multiple levels of action, helping the construction of more resilient territories in Europe and across the world. Public policies and the European structural and investment funds should pay more attention to the structural weakness of certain regions.