Resumen de Evolution and change of the Galician innovation system and policies
This chapter presents a case study of the innovation system and policies of Galicia, a European region in Northwest Spain. As this is a peripheral region both in geographical and in economic terms, the analysis of the Galician case aims at extracting lessons about the innovation and policy dynamics of non-core territories. Galicia, which owns relevant legal and political competences on industrial and innovation policies, has progressively built an institutional set-up to support innovation and so to articulate its innovation system. Nevertheless, as we will see in the chapter, many structural weaknesses persist, explaining the relatively poor innovation performance of the region in comparison with the EU average. The late 2000s economic crisis, which hit particularly hard in southern European economies, accounts also for the difficulties involved in improving the innovation performance. All in all, the Galician economic structure has not experienced significant changes and a conservative pattern has dominated over the last two decades.
