REAL CORP 008 Proceedings / Tagungsband Vienna, May 19-21 2008 www.corp.at ISBN: 978-39502139-4-2 (CD-ROM); ISBN: 978-39502139-5-9 (Print) Editors: Manfred SCHRENK, Vasily V. POPOVICH, Dirk ENGELKE, Pietro ELISEI 131 Real distances matter. Regional concepts of innovation and regions of innovations Thomas BLASCHKE, Harald SUITNER, Marie-Charlotte HOFFMANN, Thomas PRINZ (Prof. Dr. Thomas Blaschke, University of Salzburg, Z_GIS Centre for Geoinformatics, A-5020 Salzburg) (MMag. Harald Suitner, GIScluster Salzburg, A-5020 Salzburg) (Dr. Marie-Charlotte Hoffmann, Österreichisches Wirtschaftsbüro, D-40549 Düsseldorf) (Mag. Dr. Thomas Prinz, Research Studio iSPACe, A-5020 Salzburg) 1 ABSTRACT “The revenge of Geography” was the title of an article in “The Economist” responding to an earlier article in the same journal in 2001. Even earlier, the book “The death of distance” (1997) emphasized the role of the internet and hypothesized that real distances will lose importance in real life through the development of internet applications. This article builds on existing and well discussed spatial concepts and the foundations of GIscience as a discipline over the last years and tries to avoid repeating the ‘unique selling point’ of spatial data. Instead it emphasises overlaps and synergies between GIScience research and regional innovation research. 2 SPACE MATTERS When coming from a GIS or Geography background it seems to be natural to start with a slogan like “space matters”. Space matters in the issues political scientists, economists, urban planners, public administrators and other social scientists and public policy professionals study. In the 1980s and 1990s GIS and spatial analysis methods were dominated by natural resource applications and by studying physical processes. Spatial analysis is entirely absent from most social science and public policy research methods. Increasingly, spatially integrated social science seeks to correct this shortcoming by integrating spatial concepts and GIS operations into social science. The European Union’s concept of the 'Information Society' claims that the spatial aspect is pertinent to a majority of information aspects (see ESPON Project 2.1.1 Territorial impact of EU Transport and TEN policies). The spatial dimension is a key component of the 'context' of objects, and affects our daily lives and actions. It is the concept of ‘location’ that provides the best general means of connecting virtual and real worlds. This connect in turn is required to provide business models for the information economy. Understandably, GI-technology has been established to a certain degree in a few economic sectors, such as natural resource management, forestry, or spatial planning. Newer fields include real estate, insurance business or the health care sector, concerning epidemiology, hospital management and patient care logistics. In general, economic interest in GI has risen significantly in the last few years and there is a strong demand from different branches for better data access, data standards and geodata business models, just to name a few hot topics in GIscience research. 3 INNOVATIONS AND REGIONS Agencies being responsible for innovation transfer and business development have very little tradition in using spatially explicit tools. This may seem not to be logic since city and regional planners deal with physical space. They must understand spatial relationships between land use and transportation in the cities and regions they are planning. Spatial analysis of planning issues can help them plan more effectively (Huxhold et al. 2004). Planning support systems can inform their practice and are effectively supported by GIS-based applications. Still, spatial analysis is currently very limited and the question highlighted in the title of this paper – do real distances matter? – is not actively addressed. The interaction between new technologies and job markets often appears in a linear economic argumentation. “This implies a modification in the productive combination of factors, the evolution of the relative productivity of each factor, and a change in the demand for each factor” (Ramioul 2006:100). Thus, technological changes are analysed basically in terms of economic growth, job creation and job destruction in different sectoral changes. An obvious problem in assessing the actual effects of innovation on qualitative and quantitative features within a region is the fact that it is impossible to isolate the ‘net effects’ of technological change from the effects of other factors influencing the regional labour markets. The latter are only to some extent bound up