ABSTRACT
While Storper (1995) famously acclaimed that regional economies have resurged at the centre of contemporary analyses on economic development - and this claim has been echoed in various forms in the course of the past decade - it is still frustratingly unclear why the region should be so central in improving innovativeness and productivity growth (cf. Gertler 2003, p. 132). Looking back at the literature of the last century, Brown and Duguid (2001) wonder whether we have made progress since Alfred Marshall's insightful work on industrial districts. Indeed, even recent work on the cognitive dimension of economic development appear to be not a far throw from Marshall's original interests (cf. Loasby 1998). A pressing question is to what extent our present thinking and conceptualization provides an adequate basis for understanding the role regions play in today's highly complex, 'globally' integrated economy.
