Building absorptive capacity in a learning region: a socio-technical model

In the ten years since Cohen and Levinthal's seminal paper on absorptive capacity significant changes have occurred in the types and forms of commercial knowledge, networking organisational forms and the direction of innovation and the technological regime. This paper uses Molina's socio-technical constituency approach to structure an assessment of recent debates around an economic development strategy for West Lothian, Scotland which challenge some of the original formulation of absorptive capacity, and update other aspects, contributing to current theoretical and policy debate on learning regions. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.