ABSTRACT
An important change in the organisation of knowledge production across economies nationally and internationally over recent years has been the growth of R&D outsourcing. But while this development has been acknowledged within the literature, it has not received the level of attention it deserves, given the interest there is in knowledge economies. So while there has been some examination of the pressures that lead firms to undertake outsourcing, little at all has been published about the growth of specialist R&D services firms to undertake this work, the routes through which these firms have emerged, and their role in regional innovation systems (but see Howells, 1997, 1999; Koschatzsky, 2004; Readman and Hales, 2000). The first purpose of the present chapter is therefore to address this deficit by examining the evidence generated through a regional case study of the R&D services sector. But the reorganisation of R&D has implications for the process of regional development, a process that is often conceived within evolutionary economics in terms of path dependence, and so the second and more general purpose here is to explore – albeit tentatively at this stage – the implications of this reorganisation for notions of path dependence.
