Systemic Innovation: Triple Helix, Scalar Envelopes, or Regional Knowledge Capabilities, an Overview.

Abstract

This paper proposes to review and assess social scientific debate about the origins and nature of innovation in modern society. The paper focuses on three sub-sets of conceptualisation, critique and commentary that refer specifically to sub-national or regional innovation systems. Research in the latter field has grown enormously in recent years. Moreover, new perspectives from other disciplines than regional science have been promoted. One distinctive view of relevance in that it is focused on the role in innovation of specific ‘entrepreneurial universities ’ in relation to industry and government is, of course, the ‘Triple Helix ’ approach. This is reviewed and sympathetically critiqued. A second view, less sympathetically critiqued here, is one that itself attacks all so-called ‘new regionalism ’ for stressing the importance of institutions, industry embeddedness and the micro-science of regional economic development. Dazzled by globalisation and the totalising power of ‘scale ’ geographies, this rejection of the worth of spatial analysis at less than the global or national ‘scalar envelope ’ is assessed for its potential insights into weaknesses of the regional innovation systems approach but found wanting in both technical accuracy and scholarly competence. Finally, the state of the art in regional innovation systems research is sketched by reference both to recent longitudinal findings and elaborations into specific technological fields, particularly Bioregional Innovation Systems that help move us towards a newer theory of economic geography in the knowledge economy, based on ‘regional knowledge capabilities’.

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