ABSTRACT
Innovation is one of the main factors that drives economic development and is often argued to be stimulated by the agglomeration of economic activities and thus to contribute to the persistence of geographical economic disparities (Grossman and Helpman, 1991; Storper, 1997; Fujita et al., 1999; Morgan, 2004). Such a perspective inevitably raises questions from the viewpoint of peripheral, sparsely populated regions. If innovation is closely associated with agglomerations and proximity between firms and other actors, peripheral regions are unlikely to be the sites of innovation. There is, however, evidence that innovation does take place in some peripheral regions (Doloreux, 2003; Jauhiainen, 2006; Onsager et al., 2007; Virkkala, 2007) and this raises the question of whether we need to rethink our understanding of innovation. It may, for example, be the case that current conceptualisations of innovation processes are based too strongly on analyses of innovation in urban areas and neglect specific dimensions of economic activity in peripheral regions.
