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House prices in China have increased greatly in recent decades, and the dynamics seem to vary across cities. It is rational to assume that urban housing prices converge to different equilibria and form club convergence (i.e., subgroups). Empirical evidence on the existence of club convergence is limited, however, as is evidence on the underlying mechanisms. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to 1) detect club convergence in housing prices across Chinese regions over the period 2006–17 and 2) examine the determinants influencing club formation. A log t test in combination with a clustering algorithm was used to assess club formation. The results showed that regional housing prices face heterogeneous dynamics, providing some evidence of housing market segmentation. Four convergence clubs of Chinese regions with different convergence levels were identified. Ordered logit model showed that population growth, income, and housing regulation are among the drivers of club formation. The results also indicated that being in a different Chinese city-tier and differences in urban healthcare affect housing market club membership. The findings are supportive for policymakers to coordinate balanced regional housing development across China.

At the intersection of regional and innovation studies, trademark research is producing stylized facts, methodological lessons and policy insights underlining the importance of softer intangible assets for regional resilience and growth. Despite all the recent attention, there are still several opportunities that the present agenda-framing piece tries to canvas, identifying at least two directions for further research: the geography of innovation/entrepreneurship and regional specialization/diversification. Not only do these emerge from a dedicated special issue in Regional Studies (to which this paper also serves as an editorial), but they also unfold in emerging research and policy trajectories.

Research on open innovation (OI) has demonstrated the benefits of openness for firm innovation processes, but studies have mostly offered cross-sectional insights on incumbent firms. This study offers a more dynamic perspective on the relevance of OI for nascent ventures. Combining entrepreneurship and OI theories, we argue that it is key for resource-scarce nascent ventures to achieve critical venture-creation milestones. While OI can help these ventures to leverage salient external partnerships, we argue that it affects their speed of reaching these milestones. We test our hypotheses on a longitudinal sample focusing on external collaboration practices of nascent ventures in the renewable energy or information and communications technology industries. Our results show that, while engaging in R&D collaborations slows down nascent ventures’ product development and sustainable profit generation activities, joining industry associations does not have a slow-down effect. Our results complement the OI literature by warning about the downsides of openness for nascent ventures, particularly during the venture creation phase, where speed is a high priority.

Literature suggests that formal and informal appropriation mechanisms, such as patents and trade secrecy, play a crucial role in obtaining returns from innovation. Whether this applies to a sustainable innovation is unclear. Appropriation mechanisms could enable the commercialization of sustainable innovations, helping diffusion and societal impact, yet could clash with the principles of openness and sharing that characterize sustainable innovations. This may limit sustainable innovations’ commercial success. To shed light on this debate we analyzed an original sample of sustainable innovations by Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises. We found that sustainable innovations make use of informal appropriation mechanisms, such as lead time advantage and confidentiality agreements, and that these mechanisms are positively associated with commercial success. The positive and negative views on appropriation mechanisms in a sustainable innovation context actually vary by mechanism. The results suggest that firms introducing sustainable innovations behave similarly to other small and medium-sized enterprises innovators when it comes to use of appropriation mechanisms, but the extent to which such mechanisms enable commercial success reveals important specificities. Implications for managers include the use of first-mover advantages to stay ahead of the competition. Service innovations may benefit from using confidentiality agreements. Policymakers can promote simplicity, interoperability, and right-to-repair initiatives to reduce product complexity and hence waste, thereby lowering the negative impact of complexity on commercial success. The results also contribute to the literature in which associations between innovation, sustainability and economic performance were reported for small and medium-sized enterprises.

While coworking spaces (CSs) were traditionally viewed as a necessity for self-employed workers and freelancers, we outline how different users have also adopted the concept, even more so during the pandemic. The range of users has now expanded with employees from all sorts of companies who need to balance remote working with their private lives at home. We indicate avenues for future growth, in particular when the use of a CS becomes a lifestyle choice, and present paths for future research on CS users.

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 past 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 policy (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.

This paper discusses the effects of industrial agglomeration on electrical energy consumption from a spatial perspective by highlighting multiple agglomeration types. It is argued that different types of industry agglomeration may exert differentiated effects on energy consumption and their possible spatial interactions. With city sector panel data of China's 285 prefecture-level cities for the period 2003–2013, we adopted the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) with fixed effects to examine the spatial effects of industrial agglomeration types on energy consumption. The model found that all types of industrial agglomeration play significant and different roles in explaining overall local energy consumption. Second, geographical proximity, diversity, and related variety show the spatial spillover effects on surrounding areas. Third, the spatial energy effects of industrial agglomeration across regions are evidently heterogeneous. Diversity and one of its sub-forms-related variety maintains consumption-saving effects in regions with the initial or intermediate stage of an industry life cycle, while unrelated variety changes over different phases. The results suggest that policymakers scientifically discriminate regional features and guide the agglomerated types of industries in order to balance economic growth with energy conservation.

Being in the sphere of influence of other cities can have benefits as it allows cities to “borrow size,” but this can also lead to competition effects known as “agglomeration shadows.” This paper examines how these patterns of borrowing and shadowing differ from domestic settings when there is a national border between the cities. We find that borders moderate the normal regularities of a settlement system. Particularly, there is no shadow effect cast by larger cities across borders; borders protect. Cross-border market integration benefits especially similar-sized border cities. Given these unique advantages, it is time for border cities to step out of the shadows.

Wet markets, recently thrust into the limelight during the coronavirus pandemic, play a necessary role in daily life in Asia. Yet, the value of wet markets has not ever been sufficiently explored. While an increasing body of work has studied the implicit value of urban public amenities through the hedonic price model and traditional measurements of accessibility and density, the subjective perceptions of amenities have been neglected, specifically for consumption amenity. This is especially the case with wet markets: traditional approaches are unable to capture their comprehensive effects. By employing data on Beijing housing transactions in 2019 and online review scores of wet markets, we reduce this knowledge gap by exploring both the amenity and dis-amenity effects of wet markets and capturing the objective and subjective perspectives. Our results indicate a nonlinear relationship between wet market accessibility and urban housing prices. Considering the perceived quality of wet markets, this paper further indicates that housing prices near high-scoring wet markets appreciate while housing prices depreciate near low-scoring markets. Interestingly, the negative influence of low-scoring markets is statistically larger than the positive influence of high-scoring wet markets. Taking the housing price as a reflection of an owner's wealth and income level, we argue that high-income dwellers tend to pay more for perceived quality than for convenience. Our findings, therefore, offer new and refined insights for scholars and urban planning decision-makers.

The technological innovation systems (TIS) framework is one of the dominant perspectives in transitions studies to analyze success conditions and system failures of newly emerging technologies and industries. So far, TIS studies mostly adopted a rather harmonious view on the values of actors and by this were unable to address competition, conflicts and, in particular, battles over diverging directionalities within the system. To empirically assess this potential “harmony fallacy”, we identify values as part of underlying institutional logics of major organizations in the field of modular water technologies in Switzerland by means of 26 expert interviews. We show how logics may condition collaboration patterns and technological preferences. This analysis inspires key conceptual tasks of innovation system analysis, like the identification of system failures, the setting of appropriate system boundaries and the formulation of better policy recommendations.

The journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (EIST) recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Its development represents a great success, contributing substantially to the consolidation and maturation of the research field of sustainability transitions. However, being content with past successes will not be sufficient for tackling emerging challenges. In this perspective paper, we take stock of recent dynamics in the field by analyzing the evolving knowledge structure of the papers published in the journal. Based on these insights, we share the editorial priorities of the new editorial team and elaborate how we want to position the journal in the rapidly changing landscape of academic publishing. This is in the hope to align expectations with future authors and readers and to serve our quickly growing research field even better as it increasingly gains academic recognition and policy relevance. Highlights • We analyze the development of the knowledge structure in all articles published in EIST from 2011 to 2021. • The new editorial strategy is formulated as well as conditions for successful publication of papers in the journal. • We elaborate on how this strategy relates to recent development in the academic publishing landscape.

A rich body of literature is stressing the crucial importance of migration and market evolution on the underutilization of housing in cities. Rural housing is unique given its less mature market structure. Drawing on an empirical case of Sunan, the work reported in this paper addresses underlying mechanisms of housing land underutilization in rural China. Employing a multi-level modeling approach, results suggest that the likelihood of underutilization relates to household and village features, such as family attributes, housing/parcel characteristics, type of villages, and geographical locations. Additionally, underutilization was also closely associated with regional contexts including local economic development levels and migration patterns. Theoretically, we conceptualized rural housing land underutilization as a land use transition with villagers' awareness of policy change possibilities in the context of both rapid urbanization and rural transformation with nested hybrid results. We argue that urban-rural differences do not induce underutilization. Rather, policy-induced overbuilding of new houses and insistence on retaining uninhabited older houses combined with the tendency for villagers’ to view investments as a mechanism to retain ties to their rural hometowns drove underutilizaiton.

This paper criticizes traditional models of urban–regional expansion, which depart from monocentric ideals of urban core and ring. The original spatial-cycle model (SCM) suggests repeating stages of urbanization, suburbanization, disurbanization and re-urbanization. We reconceptualize the relations between core(s) and ring(s) to test the formation of urban regions under mono-, multi- and polycentric trajectories. The analysis employs local population data in functional urban regions in Finland, Austria and the Netherlands, three countries with different urbanization patterns, for the period 1961–2011. Results suggest a ‘break of the cycle’ in polycentric regions and a shift towards a different period, which we call ‘syncurbanization’.

Community shared solar (CSS) program has great potentials in contributing to the complete decarbonization of the power sectors worldwide. Few research have focused on its potential diffusion from the user perspective. This paper fills the gap by conducting a survey-based unlabeled choice experiment in the Guangdong Province, China to investigate the determinants of potential users' willingness to participate in CSS programs. We analyzed the survey data using a random parameter logit model. Our results show that users are more likely to participate in CSS programs with lower upfront payment, trialability, shorter payback period, a public utility as provider and larger impact on climate change mitigation. However, they are likely to accept longer payback period in CSS programs with higher participation rate because of the potential benefit from interpersonal communication. Users' previous knowledge of CSS programs and income will also increase their willingness to participate in CSS programs with higher upfront payment. Our results provide important implications for designing policies and business models to promote the distributive renewable energy in China.

Clean energy technologies are important for meeting long-term climate and competitiveness goals. But clean energy industries are part of global value chains (GVCs), where past manufacturing shifts from developed to emerging economies have raised questions on a decline in long-term innovation. Our research centers on how geographic shifts in the GVC shape long-term innovation, i.e., innovation in a time frame within which “mission-oriented”, societal, or firm strategic objectives need to be met rather than tactical, near-term market competitiveness alone. Focusing on wind energy, we introduce a temporal measure to distinguish between long-term and short-term innovation, applying natural language processing methods on patent text data. We consider supply-side value chain factors (i.e., manufacturing supplier relationships with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)) and demand-side factors (i.e., policy-induced clean energy market growth), shaping the patenting activities of 358 global specialized wind suppliers (2006–2016). Our findings suggest that the wind industry did not suppress long-term innovation during manufacturing shifts, in this case, to China. After 2012 when China developed a large, wind market, long-term innovation increased by 80.7 % in European supplier s working with non-European OEMs (including Chinese) and by 67.2% in Chinese suppliers working with non-Chinese OEMs. Our results highlight the importance of coupling international manufacturing relationships with sizeable local demand for inducing long-term innovation. Our results advance research in innovation, GVCs, and green industrial policy with implications for several industries that can contribute to climate mitigation.

Regional integration is increasingly used as a policy strategy to accelerate urban development and regional cooperation. This research assesses the effects of regional integration on housing prices to evaluate policy effectiveness for small and medium-sized cities on the peripheries of core cities. Taking as a case study the Chinese city of Kaifeng—a contiguous city in the Zhengzhou megaregion—we utilized hedonic house price modelling and spatial econometrics to investigate the effect of Kaifeng’s integration with the core city on the dynamics and determinants of housing prices between 2001 and 2016. The results show that housing prices in Kaifeng increased significantly after the city’s integration with Zhengzhou in 2005. Further, the results confirm that the regional integration had a significantly positive effect on housing prices, especially in border areas. Moreover, the new time-saving cross-border light rail system had more influence on the prices of nearby housing than the new expressway, and new urban districts with high-quality amenities led to a sharp rise in housing prices in Kaifeng. Our findings offer policymakers some guidance concerning regional cooperation and urban development.

The use of co-occurrence data is common in various domains. Co-occurrence data often needs to be normalized to correct for the size effect. To this end, van Eck and Waltman (2009) recommend a probabilistic measure known as the association strength. However, this formula, based on combinations with repetition, implicitly assumes that observations from the same entity can co-occur even though in the intended usage of the measure these self-co-occurrences are nonexistent. A more accurate measure based on combinations without repetition is introduced here and compared to the original formula in mathematical derivations, simulations, and patent data, which shows that the original formula overestimates the relation between a pair and that some pairs are more overestimated than others. The new measure is available in the EconGeo package for R maintained by Balland (2016).

There is a growing recognition of the importance of the creation of new industrial specialisations for sustained regional growth. However, path dependency often limits a region’s ability to do so, as the occurrence of new industrial specialisations is conditioned by its existing industrial base. In this paper, we use data for 269 NUTS-2 EU regions to examine whether regional Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and Research and Development (R&D) enhance the capacity of regions to specialise in new industries, against the forces of path dependence. Our findings show that both KIBS and R&D exercise direct positive effects on the creation of new industry specialisations and that professional-KIBS and public R&D impact negatively on the relatedness of new specialisations, while private R&D does so positively.