Innovation and Growth Potentials of European Regions: A Meta-Multicriteria Analysis

Creative regions are nowadays seen as foci of innovation and growth and are hence regarded strategic areas in a fierce—and often global—competition. This paper aims at providing an operational assessment framework for evaluating the innovation potential of competing regions on the basis of statistical indicators that mirror the indigenous regional creative resources. A set of five distinct evaluation methods is proposed to assess this innovation potential, on the basis of a comparative study on nine regions in Europe. This approach enables us to identify and rank the most promising regions. The robustness of the findings is tested by applying a meta-multicriteria analysis.