Few industries are more concentrated than the global fashion industry. We analyse the geography and evolution of the ready-to-wear fashion design industry by looking at the yearly entry rates following an organizational ecology approach. In contrast to earlier studies on manufacturing...

Urban economic growth and industrial clustering is traditionally explained by Marshallian agglomeration economies benefiting co-located firms. The focus on firms rather than people has been challenged by Florida arguing that urban amenities and a tolerant climate attract creative people, and the...

The concept of path dependence has gained momentum in the social sciences, particularly in economic geography. In this paper, we explore the empirical literature on path dependence and path creation in regional economic development. We offer a critical reflection on these studies and outline...

The cluster literature suffers from a number of shortcomings: (1) by and large, cluster studies do not take into account that firms in a cluster are heterogeneous in terms of capabilities; (2) cluster studies tend to overemphasize the importance of place and geographical proximity and...

The traditional district literature tends to assume that: (1) the competitiveness of firms depends on external sources of knowledge; (2) all firms in a district benefit from knowledge externalities; (3) relying on external knowledge relationships necessarily means these are confined to the...

The paper explains the commonalities and differences between neoclassical, institutional and evolutionary approaches that have been influential in economic geography during the last couple of decades. For all three approaches, we argue that they are in agreement in some respects and in conflict...

In the last decade, the Finnish economy has shown an unprecedented recovery, after being hit by a deep crisis in the early 1990s. The paper views and interprets this successful transformation process based on ICT from an evolutionary perspective. Although the rapid pace of the restructuring of...

The paper analyses from an evolutionary perspective how retailers respond and adapt to b2c e-commerce. As such, the paper explores the diversity of behavior of retailers with respect to the adoption of e-commerce. More in particular, it examines empirically the extent to which the adoption of...

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...

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...