ABSTRACT
This chapter is the recent growing interest in 'learning' and 'knowledge' as a route, to corporate and regional economic success. This is one facet of the growing, and generally productive, engagement between economic geographers and regional analysts on the one hand and evolutionary and institutional economists on the other. The chapter focus 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 new possibilities for the conception, implementation and practice of policy. It recognizes the importance of innovation and knowledge creation to economic success is hardly novel and that the contemporary focus on learning is in many ways simply a new twist on an old theme that 'knowledge is power'. It describes the context of continuities and changes within capitalism, and the ways in which these have been understood, as a further step in this process of contextualization and situation.
