Over the past three decades, research on innovation has shown that the results of business innovation can only be explained through combinations of internal assets and external resources available in the company environment. No resource or capability on its own is sufficient to unleash the process of technological change. This is particularly true in the case of emerging sectors with high technology content in peripheral regions. In this context, the creation of new technological pathways often requires deep transformations of both the internal capacities of companies and the characteristics of their environment. It is for this reason that the evolution of the Galician aerospace sector has recently attracted the attention of innovation systems scholars. Nevertheless, there have been few efforts to use the knowledge of the functioning of innovation systems to assess their past and current state, to design adequate instruments which allow for the promotion of their insertion into the local innovation system and promote their international competitiveness.

The objective of this research was to generate a proposal for policies and support instruments to promote the aerospace sector in Galicia. To this end, the project had to: (i) analyse the aerospace innovation system in Galicia; (ii) place it within the international context; (iii) identify its challenges and opportunities; (iv) assess the appropriateness of the current innovation policy; and (v) produce recommendations to bring about the development of the innovation capacity of the sector and, as a result, its greater internationalisation.

The study is comprised of three stages. In the first, a diagnosis was made of the local Galician environment compared to the environment of other aerospace innovation systems. To this end, data from the Regional Innovation Scoreboard were used, selecting regions in which other aerospace innovation systems are located (for example, the members of the European Aerospace Cluster Partnership; EACP), as well as regional data on sector specialisation from Eurostat and the OECD, and business data from the Orbis and Sabi databases on turnover, R&D, patents and internationalisation. These data allowed for the Galician aerospace system to categorised within the European context.

In the second stage, a documentary review was performed of the policies on promoting the aerospace sector in the international and Galician context, both in scientific research work and policy guidance documents. This stage of the study allowed the policy instruments in Galicia to be placed in an international context and, together with the results of the first stage, it made it possible to identify whether these potential differences could be explained based on the specificity of the Galician aerospace system. The outcome of this stage was a set of policy recommendations.

In the third stage of the study, the appropriateness of the second-stage findings were submitted for consultation by a group of experts, whereby experts from different sectors involved in the Galician aerospace system (companies, technology centres, government and universities) were able to assess the appropriateness of the policy recommendations for the sector.