Talents and Innovative Regions: exploring the Importance of Face-to-Face Communication and Buzz

This paper argues that face-to-face communication and buzz are becoming increasingly important in the regionalizing le arning economy. This reflects the importance of inn ovations as a means of enhancing regional competitiveness. While concurring with the new streams of literature in geography highlighting the importance of face-to-face and buzz, it is argued that this lite rature is misleading on three interrelated accounts. Firstly, it conflates face-to-face and buzz by e.g. looking at buzz as the result of positive effects of face-to-face. Secondly, it fails to distinguish between the importance of respectively face-to-face and buzz for industries drawing on different knowledge bases; being analytical, synthetic and symbolic. Thirdly, these conceptual inadequacies lead to exaggerating the importance of cities as sites for creation of innovations, hence regional competitiveness. <p> Through unpacking the distinctions between face-to-face and buzz and applying an industrial knowledge base approach we seek to reconstruct an alternative framework that allows for a systematic differentiation between the importance of both face-to- face and buzz for industries drawing on the different knowledg e-bases. This provides a frame work for developing more realistic locational predictions, with respect to the attractiveness of cities and regions as sites for generating regional competitiveness.