Son, JW; (2022) Innovation and Regional Development. In: The International Encyclopedia of Geography People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Wiley

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Abstract

The traditional view of regional development and innovation is based on the innovator–learner dichotomy: a small number of regions produce innovations, and others develop by learning from these innovative regions. However, researchers in the 1980s revealed a blurred line between innovation and learning, leading to burgeoning geographical literature on innovation and regional development. After four decades, research has generally agreed that (i) innovation is one of the main drivers of regional development in advanced economies; (ii) innovation is often a product of a system of regional actors, rather than one inventor or a firm; (iii) some regions have cultures that facilitate communication and collaboration, and such cultures stimulate and facilitate innovation; (iv) innovation is often a recombination of existing knowledge in the region; (v) external knowledge should be regularly infused to keep recombination opportunities abundant; (vi) radical innovations may occur outside the traditional core regions; and (vii) innovation-based regional development is mainly a phenomenon of advanced economies, although a limited number of regions outside the core are also successful in innovation-based development.

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