Transversality and Transition: Green Innovation and New Regional Path Creation

Abstract

Since Paul David first published his economic histories of path-dependent innovation, the subject has exerted fascination upon scholars of innovation and technological change and, latterly, regional scientists and economic geographers. This paper speaks of the third and fourth of these communities in the main, though it may have theoretical and empirical elements of interest to the first two as well. It begins with an overview of recent perspectives and critiques concerning the relevance of the path dependence concept to the understanding of regional economic development and its associated governance. It then goes on to discuss the contribution of evolutionary economic geography to thinking about “branching” from path dependence and the creation of new paths. Evidence for key generic spatial processes of path transition is provided before the main content of the paper concludes with new insights into the contributions of regional innovation policy to path evolution. Conclusions are then drawn.

Acknowledgements

This paper was prepared for the “New Path Creation” workshop at Trinity College, Oxford, 5–7 September 2010. The author thanks the organizers and participants for their valuable comments. The author also thanks Koen Frenken of the University of Eindhoven for advice on the history of “related variety” and Ron Boschma of the University of Utrecht for his constructive and informative comments on other theoretical aspects of the paper.

Notes

It can be objected that Storper and Walker allow for agency: explicitly that human agency will make the difference in some regional contexts, while not in others (acknowledgement to Ron Boschma for pointing this out). But this is rather ambiguous. Does it mean that the same agency works in location A but not in location B? Or that success in location A requires little or no agency? There clearly have to be vision, agency and resources to move through the WLO. The “winners” thus gain their fortune from Pasteur's “prepared mind”. The “losers” did not prepare or do it well enough. The WLO thus seems to be a post-rationalization and is, in itself, just a “medium” rather than an active social agent. Maybe it is simply a metaphor, but not necessarily a helpful one that also invites “chance” “explanation”. Incidentally, Sydow et al. (2009) show that efforts at chance explanations are in effect lazy since these authors utilize painstaking historical inquiry to reveal social agency explaining all cases cited. This criticism can also be extended to “dartboard” theory as promulgated by the likes of Ellison and Glaeser (1997).

Ron Boschma comments that the study did not investigate the Amsterdam banking cluster from its very beginning (but only from 1850 due to data availability), so this citation does not tell the whole story of the paper.

Readers interested in the other case material, including accounting for Iceland's transition from fish to finance as a radical branching into a new developmental pathway and Lombardy's socio-cultural regime changing breaks with previous fashion path dependences, may refer to Cooke (2010c).

Both the ensuing accounts are based on original documentary and interview research in the regions in question. The Danish research has been ongoing alongside my adjunct professorship at Aalborg University since 2006 and conducted with the help of my colleague there, Søren Kerndrup. The Swedish research was conducted in a project for the Swedish Economic Development Agency (Tilväxtverket) in January 2010.

The concept of co-evolution, however, is not limited to this field. Compare, for example, Nelson (1994), Nelson (2008) and Cantwell et al. (2010). However, these authors are not concerned with related variety or specific industries. Rather they concentrate principally upon the co-evolution of technology markets and regulatory regimes. I am grateful to Martin Heidenreich for these reminders.

Originating in Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) theorization of regime evolution and hegemony, it is illuminatingly deployed in Davenport and Leitch's (2009) account of pro- and anti-genetically modified organism discourse strategies in agricultural politics.