ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how firms in three regional clusters in Norway - the shipbuilding industry at Sunnm0re, the mechanical engineering industry at Jaeren and the electronics industry at Horten - exploit both place-specific local resources and institutions as well as external, world-class knowledge, respectively to strengthen their competitiveness. From these case studies, we make five points:

• ideal-typical regional innovation systems, i.e. regional clusters 'surrounded' by supporting local organisations, are rather uncommon, at least in a country like Norway;

• external contacts, outside the local industrial milieu, are crucial to innovation processes in many SMEs;

• innovation processes may, nevertheless, be regarded as regional phenomena in regional clusters, as regional resources and collaborative networks often have decisive significance for firms' innovation activity;

• regional resources include both tacit and codified knowledge that, combined, are place-specific, contextual and geographically immobile;

• innovation activity in the three regional clusters can be conceptualised as 'regional innovation networks'.