The article presents a regional innovation policy model, based on the idea of constructing regional advantage. This policy model brings together concepts like related variety, knowledge bases and policy platforms. Related variety attaches great importance to knowledge spillovers across...

Although informal knowledge networks have often been regarded as a key ingredient behind the success of industrial clusters, the forces that shape their structure and dynamics remain largely unknown. Drawing on recent network dynamic models, we analyze the evolution of business and technical...

Klepper’s theory of industry clustering based on organizational reproduction and inheritance through spinoffs challenged the Marshallian view on industry clustering. The paper provides an assessment of Klepper’s theoretical and empirical work on industry clustering. We explore how ‘new’...

Cluster policies have been recently called into question in the aftermath of several empirical evidences. Disentangling how market and network failures arguments play together in cluster policy design, we look for more robust micro foundations of network structuring in clusters. Our aim is to...

The economic return of cluster policies has been recently called into question. Essentially based on a “one size fits all” approach consisting in boosting R&D collaborations and reinforcing network density in regions, cluster policies are suspected to have failed in reaching their...

The Varieties of Capitalism literature has drawn little attention to industrial renewal and diversification, while the related diversification literature has neglected the institutional dimension of industrial change. Bringing together both literatures, the paper proposes that institutions have...

Economic geographers have recently been confronted with attempts to constitute both relational and evolutionary economic geography. The two proposed paradigms have much in common, such as the perception of space as being socially constructed instead of a pre-given entity with causal powers....

This paper argues that in its 'canonical' form, the path dependence model, with its core concept of 'lock-in, affords a very restrictive and narrowly applicable account of regional and local industrial evolution, an account moreover that is tied to problematic underpinnings based on equilibrist...

We propose a framework that specifies the process of economic development as an evolutionary branching process of product innovations. Each product innovation provides a growth opportunity for an existing firm or a new firm, and for an existing city or a new city. One can then obtain both firm...

Thus far, most of the work towards the construction of an evolutionary economic geography has drawn upon a particular version of evolutionary economics, namely the Nelson-Winter framework, which blends Darwinian concepts and metaphors (especially variety, selection, novelty and inheritance) and...