Regional systems of innovation: Case of the region La Safor. Proposal of a reinforcing-revitalizing structure of the territory

The present Thesis places in the project to analyze a territory, in this case the region of La Safor in la Comunidad Valenciana, from the perspective of the models of Territorial Systems of Innovation and the models who study the interactions between the actors who form the System of Innovation of a territory, doing special emphasis in the economic agents, and concretely the companies. It is a question of analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of SMEs of the region, considering the relations between companies and the actors of the System of Innovation, and to establish nets of information inside the territory and with the exterior. All this under the prism of reinforcing the territorial competitiveness and to develop a Reinforcing-Revitalizing Structure of the Territory (RST) that is applicable to the region of The Safor and to territories with similar characteristics.;The work that we develop in the present Thesis starts from a theoretical review on the concepts of innovation, technology, I+D and knowledge management, analyzing his role in the process of innovation and in the Systems of Innovation, checking the different models who have been proposed for these and emphasizing the concepts of knowledge management and competitiveness as fundamental and intrinsic elements of the innovation in the managerial field and to the territory. In this aim the concept of System of Innovation will be analyzed, studying the different theoretical existing contributions up to the date.;The general hypothesis is in that the different levels of development of the clusters, regions and countries may have a relationship with the degree of efficiency, efficiency and flexibility of the interaction and the communication between the different actors and institutions in an innovation net, which facilitates or prevents the creation and diffusion of the knowledge, and for that reason the development of the territory.;Our aim is to obtain a model of Reinforcing-Revitalizing Structure of the Territory (RST) that, starting from the existing studies on the national and regional systems of innovation and of the integration of the advantages already existing in these models; it affects in the processes of interaction between the agents of the Regional System of Innovation (RSI) of a territory, and concretely of The region of La Safor (Comunidad Valenciana), identifying the actors who interact in this one and centring the attention on the relations between the same ones, so that it is possible to characterize the dynamics of interaction between them and in this way promote an improvement of the competitiveness of the territory. Basing on the concept of net relations, between the actors who form every element of the system as between the elements between them, the relation will be analyzed, first from a qualitative perspective, with personal interviews to the agents of the Territorial System of Innovation (TSI) in La Safor. Later, and from a quantitative perspective, there has been elaborated a technological test that helps to identify which variables have more weight at the moment of considering the design of a Reinforcing-Revitalizing Structure of the Territory (RST). These interviews and test have been considered, also, to make clear the set of relations that are established between the economic agents of the territory, especially the SMEs.