Research and Practice: Partners and/or Competitors?

Innovations, innovation potential and innovation transfer are very actual topics in many fields of people’s activities. This problematic intersects very broad spectrum of disciplines, from regional development crossing economy to much specified business management and engineering. In the geographical studies this theme appears most often in the connection to social economic situation, internal or external potential and regional development on different hierarchical levels. This paper summarizes the results of research (questionnaires and interviews), which was carried out in the same time on both sides of the border (in the Usti region and in the Central Saxony¹). It was held under the cross border project “Innovation potential as a factor of increasing of the competitiveness of the Czech-Saxon borderland” (INPOK). Target respondents were on both sides the same: subjects from practices (companies), research and development institutions (high schools, universities, research institutes), then the public administration (above all the municipalities) and the regional actors (for example the economic chambers). We have focuses on analyzing the general framework conditions of the Czech-Saxon borderland, its strengths and weaknesses in the connection with active cross border cooperation above all between the research and practice field with the stress on the innovation behaviour in the study area.