ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explore the ways in which socio-economic tendencies towards globalisation are being regionalised in the UK’s high-technology industries. It does so taking as examples two industrial sectors, biotechnology and aerospace. Much of the empirical evidence used here is the product of two earlier studies of high technology in the UK, the Archipelago Europe 1 and 2 studies (Hickie 1991, 1996). Conceptually it draws heavily upon the work of Hilpert (1991). In those studies an Island of Innovation is defined as: ‘…an organisational and spatial centre of basic, strategic and applied research activity in the technological field concerned’ (Hickie 1991, p. 1). For the purposes of this study a high technology network is taken to be a persistent relationship between two or more organisations, whose purpose is the development of a new product or process, and which involves both the use and exchange of scientific and technological information, knowledge or expertise.
