ABSTRACT
In the 1990s I worked for several years on industrial and knowledge development in a
highly industrialized region in Western Norway. The local companies were small and
medium-sized commodity producers that competed on the international marketplace.
Our special focus was on developing a local learning and competence network (Snow
and Hanssen-Bauer, 1996; Levin and Knutstad, 2003) that had as a primary goal to
