CFP: Cooperation, Clusters and Knowledge Transfer ... (Springer book)

[entrepreneurship-phd at lists.uni-due.de]

From: João Ferreira [mailto:jjmf at ubi.pt] 
Date: Mon 30 May 2011 15:48

Cooperation, Clusters and Knowledge Transfer University-Firm toward Regional Competitiveness
A book to be published by SPRINGER: www.springer.com/?SGWID=0-102-0-0-0
Editors: 
João Ferreira, Mario Raposo, Roel Rutten and Attila Varga 

CALL FOR CHAPTERS 
 
Nowadays, one of the key aspects for firms, if not the most determining, is their competitiveness. Traditionally, the efforts to explain the competitiveness of a territory have been based on an aggregated perspective, concentrating on the characteristics of the factors, on the macroeconomics indicators and on the government politics. 

However, it has been verified that the traditional theory of the comparative advantage is not enough to understand the new demand patterns that the countries have to face. Porter (1990) defends a new paradigm of competitiveness, based on a process of dynamic innovation of the firms and industries. It is important to consider the evolution in the determinant factors of competitiveness which has been delineated, progressive and growing based in intangible factors. 

There is a wide evidence that Small Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) still play a wide role in sustaining growth and employment in Europe and in particular in regions eligible for the new regional competitiveness and employment objective. Regional competitiveness can be defined as the capability of the region to attract and maintain firms with stable or increasing market shares in an activity while maintaining stable or increasing standards of living for those who participate in it (Malmberg and Maskell, 1995). According to these authors, the institutional endowment of a region or a country should be defined broadly and include all institutions related to the following factors: production; efficiency of the market for goods and services; quality of the demand; governmental forms; and entrepreneurship. This institutional network approach provides the functioning and development of Regional Innovation System (RIS) which should embrace all regional key-players.
In today's modern society regional competitiveness and inter-firm cooperation are two essentially important fields of studies. 
In dynamic and turbulent environment determinants like risks, opportunities, efficiency and adaptability of production play an important role when determining the best action policy to any given business relationship (Boschma, 2004). In business networks the actions that one firm makes will also affect to the whole network and thus also to each individual network firms.
Cooperation between firms and between firms and universities in a region can be seen as a foundation for regional competitiveness. Furthermore, cooperation and clusters have become the guiding paradigms for explaining and promoting regional competitiveness. Despite the advances that have been made in literature, the cooperation process between firms, the knowledge transfer university-firm in guiding the regional competitiveness has received relatively little attention. The aim of this book is to fill this gap. This is done by bringing together new contributions from established scholars in the fields of management and economics literature and the regional competitiveness literature.
The mission of the proposed book is to discuss the main issues, challenges, opportunities and trends related to this exciting topic of cooperation and knowledge transfer university-firm for regional competitiveness.  This book theme is chosen with recognition that issues surrounding cooperation and clusters policies, knowledge among university and firms, and regional competitiveness that profoundly shape the context in which organizations face the challenge of managing sustainably in the 21st century. The books is intended to foster an international exchange of scientific perspectives, in a very comprehensive way, aiming to disseminate current developments, case studies, best practices, and new integrated theoretical approaches and applications. We think that such approaches will open up some new directions of thought. The book goes beyond the traditional economic approach of clusters and includes 'soft factors' in the explanation of regional competitiveness and it connects the literature on clusters to the literature of learning and knowledge creation as sources of regional competitiveness.

Recommended Topics:
The book intends to collect the most recent developments in all embraced fields of knowledge; in particular from business and economics areas. It is intended to cover the following broad areas:
1. Cooperation Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches 
2. Clusters: A Regional Perspective 
3. Spillovers and Knowledge Transfer 
4. Empirical Case studies 
 
Submission Procedure:
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before September 15, 2011, a 1-5 page manuscript proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter. This proposal should be sent in Word format to jjmf66 at gmail.com.

Authors will be notified by September 30 about the status of their proposals. Authors of accepted proposals will be sent guidelines to prepare the full chapter (7,000 - 10,000 words) and will have until December 15 after notification to submit the full chapter. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review. 

This book is scheduled to be published by SPRINGER. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.springer.com/?SGWID=0-102-0-0-0. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2012.

Important Dates:
September 15, 2011: Proposal Submission Deadline
September 30, 2011: Notification of Acceptance
December 15, 2011: Full Chapter Submission
March 1, 2012: Review Result Returned
May 1, 2012: Final Chapter Submission