Regional industrial development: The role of firms and regional policy learning

This thesis departs from the growing awareness of the importance of regions for industrial development and economic growth. The status of the region has also awoken an increasing awareness of constructing place-based and regional adaptive policies to foster regional growth. The work in this thesis is inspired by the regional innovation system (RIS) approach and insight into new industrial path development in the evolutionary economic geography field (EEG). A RIS is comprised of regionally located industries, a knowledge infrastructure and a support structure. These regional features are encompassed by an institutional framework. The theories of new industrial path development suggest how the industrial structure can be strengthened, developed and changed over time. However, the RIS literature’s strong focus on the functioning of systems tends to ignore the microlevel perspective of actors. The EEG field has likewise been criticised for the dearth of empirical support of the firm-level perspective in new path development. Moreover, the RIS and EEG approaches have mainly neglected the role of policy processes, and have not yet fully achieved their goal of informing regional industrial policies. Thus, the problem statement in this thesis is threefold. First, the aim is to explore relevant characteristics of industrial development in specific regions; second, to explore the implications of these characteristics for regional industrial policy; while the final aim is to discuss the implications of – and prospects for – these insights for regional policy learning. Theoretical frameworks of policy learning link organisational capacities and learning processes of stakeholders to policy changes. Regional policy learning is thus argued to be a missing link in advancing our understanding of regional industrial development.