ABSTRACT
The recent decades have witnessed an increasing prominence of the region as a relevant level for innovation policy. Theoretical discussions particularly underlined this issue in the 1990s (see, e.g., Amin and Thrift 1994; Cooke 1997; Malmberg and Maskell 1997; Morgan 1997; Storper 1997). It started being universally accepted (and it is not a paradox) that, within the general framework of increasing globalization, regions are key sites for knowledge creation and innovation. Therefore, instruments such as territory-based clusters linking private and public (in particular academic) actors developed worldwide around the turn of the millennium. They complemented overall national instruments (sector-oriented policies, tax-credit systems, etc.) with more refined and focused devices. In a way, it was the discovering or re-discovering of the idea of the innovation “ecosystem.”
