The scope of regional innovation policy to realize transformative change – a case study of the chemicals industry in western Sweden

ABSTRACT

Economic geography and innovation studies are increasingly asking how regional industrial development paths develop. This paper addresses the scope of regional innovation policy to influence transformative change in regional industries, such as that needed to cope with grand societal challenges including climate change. We take a cross-disciplinary perspective using the regional innovation system framework, which is focused on innovation-based regional development, and complement this with insights from the sociotechnical transitions literature and its conceptualizations of sociotechnical regimes and niches. Empirically, we study the case of the chemicals industry in the Gothenburg–Stenungsund region, Sweden’s largest basic chemicals industry cluster. Shifting from discussion to action appears challenging for this regional industry, despite advances in technology development, ongoing co-operation between the region’s public and private sectors and its ambition to become an international leader in the production of sustainable chemistry products by 2030. Using this case, we present a broader view of path development, one that includes under-addressed policy approaches attempting to create new sociotechnical alignments that require co-evolving changes across technologies, infrastructures, regulatory frameworks and other societal dimensions, both within and beyond the regional context.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional innovation systems
• regional innovation policy
• new path development
• transformative change
• chemicals industry
• bioeconomy

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper has greatly benefitted from comments by Anna Bergek, Christian Binz, Lars Coenen, Teis Hansen, Kevin Morgan, Michaela Trippl and Bernhard Truffer. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive inputs to the paper. All the usual caveats apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Acknowledging these types of problems generally leads to facing a high level of uncertainty in terms of how they can be addressed (Coenen, Hansen et al., 2015; Bugge, Hansen, & Klitkou, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

Vinnova [grant number 2016-04227] has generously co-funded work on this paper carried out at the Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation (CRS), Karlstad University, Sweden. An initial draft of this paper originates from PhD studies conducted at Lund University, Sweden, between 2012 and 2016.