The economic development of Northern Ostrobothnia has been in the spotlight because of rapid growth of Oulu high-technology industries. However, most of the researchers seem to concentrate on the development in Oulu without considering the situation in the whole region or its peripheries. The thesis gives an overview of the main factors that affected successful high-tech development in Oulu since 1960s as well the economic and social development in the whole region of Northern Ostrobothnia.
Innovations have become a very topical issue in research and policies during the last decades. For this reason the understanding of this term has become vague and they started to be used as buzzwords more and more often. This thesis analyses how innovations are defined in the regional strategic programmes of Norhern Ostrobothnia, what types of innovation activities are emphasized most, which industries are considered as benefiting from innovations. The usage of different territorial innovation models (innovative milieu, cluster, regional innovation system) is also analyzed. The research also examines how different geographical scales of innovation activities are seen in the studied policy documents: how the role of global scale for innovative development in Northern Ostrobothnia is understood, are there any links with national innovation system discussed, how are innovations on local scales treated.
The documents chosen for the research are regional strategic programmes for four programming periods: 2004-2006, 2007-2010, 2011-2013 and 2014-2017. The data is analyzed using qualitative content analysis, which allows to systematize and summarize the content of the text and examine in what contexts are the terms used. The analytical approach is theory-driven, however, modified with consideration to the data.
The research showed that regional strategic programmes employ broad definition of innovation, especially emphasizing marketing in the documents for the latest programming periods. Innovative activities are regarded not only in context of high-technology industries, but in relation to low- and medium-technology industries as well, though in latest documents the focus is mainly on high-tech production.
The term 'cluster' is used mainly as a buzzword, though in the latest regional strategic programme the frequency of use has decreased, alternatively the model of innovative milieu has become more popular. Concept of regional innovation system has been briefly mentioned in the documents. There has been very limited explanation of structures of any of the territorial innovation models, however, the documents linked the concept of regional innovation system to innovative milieu, seeing the first as a next stage of development of the latter.
Regional strategic programmes mention the role of innovation processes happening on different geographical levels, but the discussion is rather limited - international scale is mostly considered as global market, national scale is seen as the source of funding and on local scale the attention is mainly payed to Oulu.
