ICT and technological-economic structural change in regions
by Holger Floeting, German Institute of Urban Affairs

Why should regions be concerned about information and communication technologies (ICT)? Let me state four simple reasons:

• Technological development is not unaffected by society. Technological and societal advancement are not independent from another. On the contrary, technology is a social construct. To affect the conditions of technological progress we have to know what the technological potentials are and how we might utilize them. Technology is a tool to support our everyday life and mitigate strains.
• The increasing diffusion of ICT leads to new patterns of utilization. At the same time new disparities occur. We can find a multi-plane digital divide: at the global level, at the national level and at the regional level.
• The use of ICT has increased dramatically. Cellular phones and the Internet are the best examples of this increase.
• The virtual and material worlds interweave increasingly. "De digitale stad Amsterdam" was one of the first world wide web communities using the "town" metaphor for a website. Community members were called inhabitants, and nearly every aspect of daily life is mirrored in this kind of cyberspace. Shopping in cybermalls, meeting in chat rooms or teleworking are only a few examples. People used Internet technology to create a cyber character for themselves. But even when they are inhabitants of digital towns, they eat, work and sleep in real houses. In sum, face-to-face contacts are not abolished by e-mail contacts, chat rooms and websites, but they are complemented.

Urban areas, in particular, have to deal with technological advancement in the field of ICT. ICT is used to distribute codified knowledge. Urban areas are centres of knowledge. That is the reason why urban centres are most affected by the use of ICT. They are also hubs of the new information infrastructures like cellular phone or high-band width fixed networks. Competition between several telecom carriers or Internet providers occurs frequently in urban areas. ICT users are concentrated in these areas. Knowledge based industries are concentrated in urban areas. Here we can find innovative settings for developing new ICT services as well as the contents to transmit by using ICT. Decision makers in economics and politics are located primarily in urban areas. They use ICT themselves, but they also have to decide on the framework conditions of technology development. Therefore urban areas are locations of industrial-political decisions which define the technological future.

Developments in ICT accelerate the technological-economic structural change in regions. The ability to cope with structural change depends on how successful future oriented branches of the economy can be established and expanded in a region, and to which extend the Information Society can be developed at regional level. Up to now, there are hardly any examples for successful technological-economic structural change in Germany which have been based on previously developed strategies focusing on the region. Existing strategies are typically focusing on local areas, or are initiated by the federal states. Developments take place in a kind of “muddling through” process that is more or less influenced by regional authorities. Several actions that proved to be successful, have been ex post declared “strategies”.

There are three central fields of action for a pro-active design of regional adaptation processes to the technological-economic structural change not only in in the field of ICT:

• Regions have to be lead on the way to institutionalisation, without supporting an “over-institutionalisation” which would inhibit actions. The initiation and support of networks consisting of players from the private economy, the scientific field and public administration can proactively shape and accompany the long term process of regional structural change. They are important resources for a successful new definition of regional development concepts.
• Besides the network itself, the special importance of political promoters serving as a “bottle-neck-factor” within such a process has to be pointed out. It has to be a priority objective of political action to sure a sufficient number of such promoters in the regions.
• Technological-economic structural change needs visible model projects as illustrative examples for the successful change in all economic fields. They serve as crystallization points of regional innovative power. If they are designed to fit regional requirements, they can generate a “model effect” for the region, transfer know-how and strengthen awareness in the region as well.

Further reading:

Floeting, H (2003): “New Media” and Urban Development – Virtuality and the Formation of New Spatial Patterns in Urban Areas. German Institute of Urban Affairs, Occasional Paper, Berlin. This publication can be downloaded here.

Spars, G., Antikainen, J., Floeting, H., Heinze, M., Henckel, D., Hokkeler, M., Jonuschat, H., Mariussen, Å, Oertel, B. and Uhlin, Å (2003): Technologisch-ökonomischer Strukturwandel. Räumliche Auswirkungen und regionale Anpassungsstrategien. Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung, Bonn.

BISER Surveys show extent of regional disparities in broadband access
by Karsten Gareis and Patrizio di Nicola

Fieldwork for the two BISER surveys, a major component of the project, has been successfully completed in spring 2003. Results will be made public on this website, in a number of publications and at a various presentations and dissemination activities throughout the autum.

The 28 BISER pilot regions have been selected in order to cover the whole range of EU NUTS 2 regions with regard to income (GDP per head), sectoral structure of employment, and Member States affiliation. Analysis of the data reveal that considerable regional disparities exist when looking at Information Society indicators, which often by far exceed differences in regional income. The data also shows that nation state affiliation continues to play an important role as determinant for regional performance after income and other key independent variables have been controlled for.

The charts below show broadband penetration in the total population (aged 15 and older) and total number of establishments (with 5 employees or more), respectively. While 29 percent of the population of Liege have at-home access to the Internet via broadband, therefore enjoying high-speed and (often) always-on Internet services, around half of that percentage do so in the regions of Western Germany, and less than 5 percent in Italy’s Tuscany and Lombardy, and the Greek region Central Macedonia.

Regional disparities are only slightly smaller between establishments. About two in three businesses have broadband Internet access in Fyn (Denmark) and Catalonia (Spain); in the Greek and Irish regions in the sample, the ratio is less than one in ten.

Correlating these data with other variables collected through the BISER surveys, and with contextual data from Eurostat and other sources, reveals highly insightful patterns and developmental paths which regions seem to take on their way into the Knowledge Economy. BISER will now discuss these findings with a group of regional experts representing all pilot regions, in order to support interpretation and supplement qualitative information for each region.

"Regional Indicators of e-Government and e-Business In Information Society Technologies"
by Sonja Müller

Regional IST ("Regional Indicators of e-Government and e-Business in Information Society Technologies") is a project funded within the framework of the IST-programme of the European Union. The aim of the project is to study e-Government and e-Business implementation in selected European regions for measuring, auditing and benchmarking the use of ICT. It is split into two parts: The first part comprises the extraction and appliance of e-government and e-business indicators to be used by regional Information Society Observatories, whereas the second part of the project focuses on dialogue with decision-makers in order to shape Information Society indicators and target acceptance. The project has defined its key objectives as:

• to define the processes, products and organisational issues necessary to co-ordinate regional/national IS Observatories,
• to use data from the institutions represented in the consortium, from regional and national administrations, and from Eurostat/New Cronos,
• to test and propose an elaboration of standard nomenclatures,
• to collect data from publicly accessible Internet data,
• to define along with e-Europe local e-Government and e-Business indicators and targets,
• to carry out surveys on households and enterprises with the support of the official regional bodies,
• data processing, data analysis and data mining: data will be explored for consistent patterns and relationships,
• visualisation tool: project results will be on an interactive web backed by a database with indicators/targets per country and with a customised search engine.

Regional IST is implementing a platform to harmonise methodology and tools among regions to present reliable data about e-government and e-business. In global terms, establishing common data analysis methods and protocols among official Information Society Observatories, and adopting the most appropriate nomenclature for local directories to carry out. Worth mentioning is the approach of the Regional IST project to bundle synergies by bringing together official Information Society Observatories in the selected regions/countries (Baden-Wuerttemberg, Catalonia, Hungary, Piedmont and Portugal). In particular, Regional IST brings together observatories of different European regions in order to highlight correlation between eEurope information society targets and regional information society initiatives in the involved countries. The aim of mapping targets and indicators is to analyse concepts in order to achieve comparable results amongst all country partners. Since project partners are located in different countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Hungary), it is of paramount importance to consider local characteristics. The data collection and the interpretation of the results will therefore take these differences into account. In particular, regional authorities in Europe have different competencies and different organisational structures. Besides possible structural differences, this might lead to divergent decision making structures between the partner regions.

The data collected will reflect similar, if not identical phenomena, offering countries and regions with similar growth and/or population the opportunity to benchmark their Information Society targets and figures. Thus, the implemented platform serves as a kind of helpdesk for decision makers of other regions, which try to build up an Information Society Observatory in their region.

You can find more information about Regional-IST at http://www.regional-ist.org.

Multi-locational work and the Region
by Karsten Gareis, Tobias Hüsing and Sonja Müller

Multi-locational work, supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs), represents one key element of the current shift in the organisation of the labour process. Work which takes place at non-traditional work settings, including the home, clients’ offices, customers’ premises, and “the road”, is becoming more and more commonplace across Europe, according to results of representative surveys such as the SIBIS population surveys conducted in 2002 and 2003. ICTs play an important role in this process as they enable work tasks which were once fixed to a specific space (and often, by implication, time) to be carried out “anywhere, anytime”. The footloose workforce is a logical consequence in all those fields where workers can be more productive when liberated from their traditional work location.

Does this mean that the spatial distribution of work is developing towards more decentralised patterns, as the logic behind concentrating labour in agglomerations becomes obsolete?

The evidence from an analysis of the BISER population survey suggests that the spread of multi-locational work (which includes “telework” as it is understood most widely) is not leading to the spatial distribution of work becoming more decentralised, at least not at NUTS 2 regional level. This supports anecdotal evidence which suggests that incidences of high-qualified “knowledge workers” working from peripheral locations are seldom, and seem far from spearheading a general trend of work away from the agglomerations.

Nevertheless, there seem to be peripheral regions which fare much better than others in the European Union with regard to the share of multi-locational and other “flexible” workers (most notably in the Nordic countries). At the same time, some central regions of Europe have not participated equally in the spread of these innovative workforms (particularly in France, Spain and Italy), which might indicate diverging prospects for economic development between EU regions also at the same level of spatial centrality.

A strong effect of nation-specific factors (e.g. political and social regulation) can be detected with regard to home-based telework, in particular. This means that the ability of regions to induce the take-up of (some) ICT-based new ways of working seems to be constrained by Member State-level regulation and also cultural characteristics, at least to some extent

These findings are extracted from the BISER domain report "Work and Labour Market", which is expected to be made public on the BISER website in October 2003.

The Digital Europe Project
by Sonja Müller

Digital Europe is a pan European research project which has investigated the impacts of e-business on sustainable development. It claimed to be the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between e-business and sustainable development, and has just been finished.

Sustainable development is here understood as achieving a balance between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of human activities.

Digital Europe defines e-business as follows: "The ebusiness sector comprises companies which deliver digital technology products and services as a significant part of their core business or use digital technologies as their primary channel to market. Ebusiness as a concept refers to transactions using these technologies, such as e-work, e-commerce and e-government."

The recognition that there are strong and enduring divides between Europe's rich and poor regions and that regional inequalities follow a strong core-periphery pattern led to the following main research questions:

• Since e-business changes the perception and use of space (and time), can it deliver a more balanced spatial development?
• Will it promote regional cohesion? If so, what conditions and policies will be required? Or. will new technologies bring with them new inequalities?

The theme report "Ebusiness and sustainable regional development in Europe", of most interest for BISER, reports that econometrics research undertaken by the project seems to back the “death of distance” rather than the “Silicon Valley” hypothesis: ICT allows more dispersed spatial organisation of economic activities, and this effect is stronger at the local than at the EU Member State level. However, the ICT-dispersion effect is not evident in services, which constitute a growing part of the economy and secondly, knowledge-intensity (measured by skill and R&D intensity) does induce clustering.

As measured at the national scale, ICT adoption has tended to weaken the core super-region within Europe, the so-called 'Blue Banana' which stretches as a band from north-west Italy through the south and south-west of Germany, up the Rhine/Ruhr west German corridor, into Flanders, Belgium, southern and central Netherlands, to south-east England and the Ile de France. At the sub-national scale, the project found a clustering effect associated with the digital economy and the adoption of ICT which is stronger than that seen with traditional economic activities, although this is often better explained by industry characteristics than purely ICT intensity.

The final project report has been published as a book: "Digital Futures: living in a dot com world". You can find further information on this and Digital Europe in general at http://www.digital-eu.org.

Conference “Open Minds - Blending Differences"
by Sonja Müller

The CASE Foundation (Centre for Social and Economic Research), University of Lodz, University of Warsaw and Warsaw School of Economics had joint forces to organise a pan-European conference which was intended to mark the starting point of a long-lasting project. The aim of the OPEN MINDS project is to gather various scientific and academic circles and foster the exchange of research results and ideas at a time when Europe is moving closer together than it has been ever before. The conference was held in Lodz, Poland, from 13-15 September 2003. The focus of discussion was on the following topics, which were discussed within several parallel sessions:

Regional policy in integrated Europe in globalisation perspectives

Regional development is becoming an integral part of development strategies of all countries. Furthermore, it is also becoming key to the processes of integration with the European Union. The direction of regional policies will influence all aspects of economic growth of entire countries. The ability to meet the challenges of new geopolitical conditions will be an important factor, which has an impact on socio-economic development and the international competitiveness of regions. What are the new trends in regional policy in the perspectives of EU enlargement? How should regional policies of countries adjust to the rules and principles, which govern the European Union? How to support the competitiveness and public/private partnership in regions? The discussion within plenary and panel sessions, which concerned the topics "Regional Competitiveness", "Development of cross-border regions- an important element in the process of integration" and "Economic convergence of disadvantaged regions", revolved around these questions.

Labour market under European integration

As far as the EU enlargement is concerned, there are problems related to some already well-known issues: the impact of foreign trade, globalisation and migrations on the labour market in Europe. Restructuring of the European labour markets that will take place in the near future is strictly related to such issues as mismatch, labour market flexibility, long-term and youth unemployment. Yet, there is an even more specific issue, of great importance at the regional level: it is the expected influence of EU enlargement on the nature and effects of the EU regional cohesion funds. This section was organised in five panel sessions which contain the topics "Labour Market Policy", "Labour demand and employment", "Education", "Migration" and "Regional labour markets". A paper of special interest for the work domain of the BISER project was presented by Daiga Kamerade: "Teleworking in EU accession countries: the neglected perspectives" reports about the results of a systematic study into spread of teleworking in EU accession countries, based on a special analysis of the European Foundation's Third European Survey on the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. The research found evidence that teleworking in the accession countries develops rapidly, and that it is related to higher satisfaction with working conditions and lower gender segregation.

The BISER project was represented by Sonja Müller who used the occasion to present for the first time BISER survey results on multi-locational work in 28 selected NUTS2 regions of the EU. She focussed on the spread of telework as well as on implications for the ability of regions to reach current regional policy objectives.

Further information on the conference can be found at http://www.openminds.edu.pl/.

Forthcoming Key Events on Regions and the Information Society
by Sonja Müller

These are important forthcoming events which have a focus on regional development in the Information Society:

• e-Forum summit "e-government: Paving the Way to 2010" in Valencia, organised by the e-Forum project (15-16 September 2003), http://www.eu-forum.org/summit

• International Conference Divestment – Corporate Strategies, the Regions and Policy Responses in Lisbon, organised by the University of Lisbon (22- 23 September 2003)

• E-COMM-LINE 2003 in Bucharest, organised by ASE - Academy of Economic Studies of Bucharest and IPA SA research institute (25-26 September 2003), http://www.ipa.ro/

• IST Conference 2003 in Milano, organised by the European Commission, Directorate-General for the Information Society (2-4 October 2003) http://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2003/index_en.htm

• IADIS International Conference at the Algarve, organised by IADIS, the International Association for Development of the Information Society (5- 8 November 2003), http://www.iadis.org

• 5th Working Conference on Knowledge Management in Electronic Government (KMGov2004) in Krems, organised by Krems Danube University Krems; University of Linz, Austria; IFIP WG 8.3 & WG 8.5; GI (German Society for Informatics) GI FA 6.2: Informatics in Public Administration (17-19 May 2004), http://falcon.ifs.uni-linz.ac.at/kmgov2004/

• 30th Congress of the International Geographical Union in Glasgow, organised by the Royal Geographical Society -UK and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (15- 20 August 2004), http://www.meetingmakers.co.uk/IGC-UK2004

• Euregia 2004- Congress and Specialists Exhibition in Leipzig, organised by Euregia (27- 30 October 2004), http://www.euregia.de/messe/

empirica Gesellschaft für Kommunikations- und Technologieforschung mbH prime contractor, private research and consulting organisation specialised in telematics, telework and new ways of work, e-commerce, telecare and telehealth.

Werner B. Korte: werner.korte@empirica.com
Karsten Gareis: karsten.gareis@empirica.com
Address: Oxfordstrasse 2, 53111 Bonn - Germany
Phone: ++49.228.985300
Fax: ++49.228.9853012
Web: www.empirica.com

Dansk Teknologisk, an independent, non-profit institution approved as technological service agency by the Danish Ministry of Business and Industry.

Jeremy Millard: jeremy.millard@teknologisk.dk
Address: Teknologiparken, 800 Aarhus C - Denmark
Phone: ++45.72.201417
Fax: ++45.72.201414
Web: www.teknologisk.dk

Dipartimento di Sociologia e Comunicazione, is a research body of the University of Rome "La Sapienza", focusing on advanced studies in sociology and communication in the framework of the Information Society.

Patrizio Di Nicola: patrizio.dinicola@uniroma1.it
Renato Fontana: renato.fontana@uniroma1.it
Address: Via Salaria 113, 00198 Rome - Italy
Phone: ++39 06 4991 8404
Fax: ++39 06 8419505
Web: www.comunicazione.uniroma1.it

The Local Futures Group is a research and strategy consultancy that provides a geographical perspective on economic and social change. We introduce this perspective into public policy and corporate strategies, both in the UK and internationally.

Mark Hepworth: mark.hepworth@localfutures.com
Lee Pickavance: lee.pickavance@localfutures.com
Address: 3 Queen Square, WC1N 3AU, London - England
Phone: ++44 020 7520 8120
Fax : ++44 020 7520 8150
Web: www.localfutures.com

Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft m.b.H., a non-profit research organisation focusing on the study and the support of the development of the information and knowledge based society.

Markus Lassnig: markus.lassnig@salzburgresearch.at
Guntram Geser: guntram.geser@salzburgresearch.at
Mark Markus: mark.markus@salzburgresearch.at
Address: Jakob-Haringer-Strasse 5/III, 5020 Salzburg - Austria
Phone: ++43-662-2288-0
Fax: ++43-662-2288-222
Web: www.salzburgresearch.at

Work Research Centre, an independent research, consultancy and training company (IRL).

Richard Wynne: r.wynne@wrc-research.ie
Ivica Milicevic: i.milicevic@wrc-research.ie
Address: 1 Greenlea Drive, Terenure, Dublin 6W -Ireland
Phone: ++353.1.4927042
Fax: ++353.1.4927046
Web: www.wrc-research.ie

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