ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of the role of innovative labour markets in fostering regional development with reference to the Italian case. It does so by exploring some of the main beliefs concerning the relationship linking labour, competencies and innovation, from the perspective of the Islands of Innovation approach (Hilpert 1992, 2003). The debate in the early 1990s in the fields of economic geography and regional economics marked a clear divide in the understanding of the relationships between innovation and proximity by highlighting the role of both the national (Lundvall 1992) and regional/local scale (Cooke 1992; Hilpert 1992) in setting the conditions for innovation. Innovation is not, in fact, an aspatial phenomenon, since its production is highly spatially concentrated in specific geographical areas (see, for example, Cooke and Morgan 2000; Morgan 2004; Simmie 2005). More precisely, the public nature of knowledge (Arrow 1962), its localised spillovers (Jaffe 1989) and the relational proximity of firms (Capello and Faggian 2005) may favour the processes of ‘collective learning’ in the local system (Malmberg and Maskell 2006), so that over time agglomerations may develop specific conditions that facilitate the rapid dissemination of knowledge throughout the cluster and consequently increasing the innovative capacity of agglomerated firms (Pinch et al. 2003).
