Agenzia Regionale per la Tecnologia e l'Innovazione

Increasing globalization, if properly exploited, can provide interesting opportunities for regional economies. Nevertheless, when they are not managed with a far-sighted approach, regions, and particularly those at an intermediate level of development, can lose their comparative advantages compared with regions of developing countries. Innovation is the main instrument for improving and ensuring competitiveness to enterprises and growth opportunities to local economies. The aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of public policies in reinforcing regional innovation systems and the role of regional innovation agencies. With this in mind, we describe the policies implemented by the “Regional Agency for Technology and Innovation” of Apulia, a region in Southern Italy, highlighting its main strengths and weaknesses.

Higher education institutions are in a period of profound transformation. In particular, many governments have implemented mechanisms that attempt to relate funding to performance. In this article, we reflect about the relevance of those changes from a regional point of view, by analysing the recent introduction of a performance-based research funding system in Italy. The findings lead to policy indications, questioning the effectiveness of selective funding of universities based on national research assessment exercises when there is heterogeneity across regions in universities scientific performance and, at the same time, there is a huge dispersion of research performance within the individual universities.