ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapter 2, in the introductory chapter of Nelson’s National Innovation Systems a central hypothesis is formulated about ‘a new spirit of what might be called “techno-nationalism”’, combining a strong belief that the technological capabilities of a nation’s firms are a key source of their competitive prowess with a belief that these capabilities are in a sense national, and can be built by national action (Nelson 1993: 3). While Richard Nelson and Nathan Rosenberg were careful in this study to explain that one of their central concerns was to establish ‘whether, and if so in what ways, the concept of a “national” system made any sense today’, they also added that de facto ‘national governments act as if it did’ (Nelson 1993: 5). The purpose of this chapter is to extend our concerns about this hypothesis and to provide a framework to study ‘local’ systems of innovation as an alternative analytic level.
