ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades social scientists and policy-makers have been paying more and more attention to regions as designated sites of innovation and competitiveness in the globalising economy. The popularity of this argument can be traced back to various empirical studies of regional success stories, such as the rapid economic growth of networked small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in industrial districts in the ‘Third Italy’ (Asheim 2000), the exemplar industrial system of Silicon Valley (Saxenian 1994) as well as other examples of successful regional clustering in most developed as well as developing economies (Porter 1990). These studies all draw on the common rationale that territorial agglomeration provides the best context for an innovation-based learning economy promoting localised learning and endogenous regional economic development (Asheim 2002).
