Why are some regions more entrepreneurial than others? This study explores the determinants of manufacturing entrepreneurship at the prefectural city level in China by highlighting the influence of localisation and urbanisation economies and the significance of technological relatedness and small firm clusters. Descriptive analysis has reported significant and increasing spatial variation of manufacturing entrepreneurship in China during 2001–2007. The empirical results based on the negative binomial model provide evidence to support the business network view of entrepreneurship. Localisation economies can predict entrepreneurship well, while the effects of urbanisation economies are mixed. In terms of localisation economies, supplier/customer linkages play a very important and positive role in cultivating entrepreneurship. The mixed results of urbanisation economies are mainly derived from the interweaving of related variety and unrelated variety. The former significantly promotes entrepreneurship, while the latter in most cases discourages entrepreneurship. The clustering of small firms has a larger effect on entrepreneurship, which is consistent with the view of Vernon and Chinitz effect.

Global sustainable development critically depends on a fundamental transformation of our current energy systems. This paper looks at how countries develop different types of renewable energy technology to achieve this transformation. We highlight the placedependence in the global innovation systems of renewable energy technologies by focusing on how countries benefit from local and global knowledge. We show that both the relatedness of a country's knowledge base, and international knowledge spillovers contribute to the development of renewable energy technologies. For low-and middle-income countries, domestic markets for renewables play a crucial role in absorbing and utilising these international knowledge spillovers. The results provide a better understanding of how countries can acquire new knowledge in renewable energy technologies.

We study regional patterns of scientific knowledge production in Europe using all scientific publications in the period 2000-2014 attributed to 813 scientific subfields. We show that the existing scientific portfolio of regions offers opportunities for related diversification and discourages the creation of knowledge on topics unrelated to the local knowledge base. Many lagging regions show clear growth, but complex knowledge production remains highly concentrated in regions in the North and West of Europe. For lagging regions there are advantages in not specializing too soon and to first diversify before moving into developing more complex knowledge.

: The achievement of sustainable energy systems requires well-designed energy policies, particularly targeted strategies to plan the direction of energy development, regulations monitored and executed through credible authorities, and laws enforced by the judicial system for the enhancement of actions and national targets. The Asia-Pacific region (APAC), responsible for more than half of global energy consumption, has enacted a large number of energy policies over the last two decades, but progress on the energy transition remains slow. This study focuses on the aggregate effect of energy policies on the progress towards sustainable targets in 42 emerging economies from 2000 to 2017. We find that energy policies have contributed to improving access to electricity (3.0%), access to clean cooking (3.8%), energy efficiency (1.4%) and renewable electricity capacity (6.9%), respectively. Among different types of energy policies (strategies, laws and regulations), strategies have greater impacts on advancing electrification, clean cooking and renewable electricity capacity than laws and regulations, whereas the laws are more effective for achieving energy efficiency.

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Understanding the global knowledge dynamics of renewable energy technologies requires consideration of both technological and geographical dimensions. This paper assesses the relative importance of technological and geographical distant knowledge in the future knowledge development of technological innovation systems (TIS) of renewables. Using global renewable energy patents, we quantify the absorptive capacity of countries as the degree of knowledge accumulation in the knowledge diffusion between domestic actors in a TIS. Our results show that international knowledge flows within a renewable energy TIS are more important for countries with smaller absorptive capacity, whereas countries with larger absorptive capacity benefit more from domestic knowledge originating in other TISs. Consequently, each country faces unique opportunities and constraints with respect to global technological developments when developing renewable energy technologies. These findings lead to policy implications that are specific to developing renewable energy technologies in different countries.

This paper explores the emergence of new combinations of unrelated technologies at the regional level. The analyses show that for solar photovoltaic inventions, such unrelated technologies are more likely to be recombined when they strongly co-locate in the same region rather than in different regions. Furthermore, we show that this pattern is common to renewable energy inventions, although different dynamics are observed in different types of renewable energy technology. The results highlight the importance of place-based capabilities in facilitating breakthrough inventions in renewable energy technologies.