ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on knowledge and the processes through which it is transmitted, is often presented as a dramatic new breakthrough, of epochal significance, promising radical theoretical reappraisal and opening up exciting new possibilities for the conception, implementation and practice of policy. As Storper puts it, the region is a key, necessary element in the supply architecture for learning and innovation while the emphasis on untraded interdependencies or relational assets focuses attention upon the necessary territoriality of critical elements of non-market relations and tacit knowledge. The learning firm is, however, hardly a novel concept in the sense that knowledge has always been crucial to capitalist development. This attempt to establish such a view as hegemonic was important because it was clear in the nineteenth century that economically successful regions, which were certainly learning regions containing learning firms, were also deeply socially divided ones.
