Regional innovation, well-being and quality of life : evidence from Europe

There is a growing awareness that GDP and other traditional economic statistics suffer from not getting the full picture of how society is doing. Hence, we would like to shift attention from purely economic indicators to indicators that measure the actual quality of life. Moreover, research in innovation studies suggests that the concept of responsibility in science and technology is not only a technical matter but primarily a social and environmental one. Innovation and specifically environmental-related technologies are receiving increasing attention from scholars, practitioners and policy makers as key drivers in the development of a more sustainable and responsible economy. The term environmental is used to classify inventions that could have a positive impact on the environment and on a more sustainable world. Thus, environment-related technologies should be considered one of the key drivers of sustainable development and a better quality of life. However, we still know very little about the factors underlining the development of this category of innovations and the effects that this category of inventions could have on the so called “well-being”. In this research, we focus on European regions and we study the specific effect of sustainable innovation through the mean of environment-related technologies on the quality of life of European regions. In fact, the complex and multidisciplinary nature of sustainable innovation is expected to further strengthen the regional quality of life. A cross-sectional study of European regions over the period 2000-2014 was organized using data from the OECD Regional Well-Being, OECD RegPat, Cambridge Econometrics and Eurostat databases. Significant policy implications will be discussed in the paper.