Martha G. Russell - Dr. Martha G Russell is Executive Director of mediaX at Stanford University and Senior Research Scholar with the Human Sciences and Technology Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University and the IC2 Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. She leads business alliances and interdisciplinary research with people and information technology as the intersecting vectors. Russell’s background spans a range of business development, innovation and technology-transfer initiatives in information sciences, agriculture, communications, and microelectronics — for businesses, universities and regional development organizations. With a focus on the power of shared vision, Russell has developed planning/evaluation systems and consulted regionally and internationally on technology innovation for regional development. She studies decision processes and relational capital using data-driven approaches.

Nataliya V. Smorodinskaya - Dr. Nataliya V. Smorodinskaya is a Leading Research Scholar and Head of the Analytical Group for International Competitiveness and Network Interactions at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She holds MD in International Economics from University of Finance under the RF Government (Moscow), and PhD in Economic Theory from the Institute of Economics. She is a team leader of regional research projects, a speaker at high-level international forums, a consultant of government and business circles, the author of more than 200 academic publications on economic modernization strategies under the market and the post-industrial transitions. Her 2015 book “The Globalized Economy: from Hierarchies to a Network Order” pays special attention to innovation clusters, triple helix model, and institutional stimulators of technological advance. With a focus on global competition and innovation-led growth, she actively develops studies on network economics, associated with non-linearity, growing complexity, and the ecosystem approach in modern industrial policy.

¹ In this sense, our interpretation of collaborative innovation networks goes beyond their more narrow definition coined by Peter Gloor (Sloan School of management, MIT) in the context of management studies. According to Gloor (2006), a collaborative innovation network is a self-organizing group (a cyberteam) of highly motivated individuals that work together on the basis of collective vision to achieve a common goal by sharing ideas, information, and work.

² The metaphor “triple helix”, illustrating generation of knowledge across institutional borders, was derived from genetics: a DNA chain, in which different “helices” vine around each other and work together for the same purpose yet still maintaining individual identity within a common ecosystem. Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (1995).

³ To compensate this disadvantage, such organizationally dispersed ecosystems, such as global value chains, may assume a sophisticated glocal structure by relying on regional innovation clusters as their specialized and geographically localized network nodes. Smorodinskaya et al. (2017).

⁴ The American school of complexity science, dealing with CAS’s, began at Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico (USA), largely deriving from the discovery of Ilya Prigogine, the 1977 Nobel prize winner: in his work on “dissipative structures” he showed that not all systems tend toward disorder, some complex systems tend to generate order from disorder through a process of spontaneous self-organization. Anderson et al. (1988); Chan (2001); Holland (1995); Holland (2002).

⁵ Within the EU context, the term ‘macro-region’ means an area comprised of a number of adjacent countries or territories that share one or more common features or challenges. European Commission (2009).