Support Of Innovations In Main Development Strategies Of Regional Capitals In The Czech Republic

Abstract

Innovation and their support by the public sector are currently in focus of intensive research in the area of regional development. Innovation capacity is considered as the main source of competitiveness of regions. The role of regional governments is emphasized in concepts such as Regional Innovation Systems and Triple Helix. Municipalities represent a lower level of government. In some cases, depending on the country's public administration system and the size of the municipality, these entities may be very strong participants for regional governments. Such municipalities naturally have the potential to act as important participants in regional innovation systems, and they should clarify these roles in their strategic documents. The paper focuses on the topic of innovations support within the main development strategies of regional capitals in the Czech Republic. It provides findings on how the topic of innovations support is included in the structures of these strategies, identifies typical aims, measures, activities and instruments for supporting innovation, assesses the complexity of innovations support declared in these strategies and draws a conclusion on the importance of this topic in terms of regional capitals. Research is based on the scientific method of text document analysis. The main development strategies of twelve regional capitals in the Czech Republic were analysed by this method. The documents were gathered for the research at the turn of September and October 2019. The results of the research show that innovations support represents an important topic in the main development strategies of the regional capitals in the Czech Republic. At the same time, methodological inconsistencies in the elaboration of the examined strategies were identified, especially in terms of structure, terminology, and degree of detail.