Cutting Edge Technologies in West Sweden

Technological progress is the most important driver of competitiveness and prosperi-ty and its importance will likely become even more pronounced as increasing tenden-cies towards protectionism negatively affect other traditional growth drivers such as world trade. Unfortunately, up until now, technological progress has been hard to measure and is usually measured either as a residual variable or with auxiliary varia-bles such as research expenditure or the number of researchers. Moreover, most of these analyses are done on the industry level which has its limitations because com-panies are only categorized into one sector regardless of their countless activities and their specific usage of technologies.Are some cities adopting an intercultural approach more successfully than others? Do these intercultural cities achieve better economic or social results in terms of income, community cohesion, political stability,