Origins of Regional Innovation Systems Thinking and Recent Advances from Analysis of ‘Green Innovation’

The “green” clusters are focused on the production of new ways of non-fossil fuel energy that help to diminish the greenhouse gases overall that human activity produces. The creation of such groups reveals a curious characteristic of the economic development: we will analyse the geographic convergence that characterises the “green innovation”. Firstly we will analyse the cases of North and South California, where the so-called cleantech or greentech type of industry that appears in that area in the way of clusters, is developed by the convergence of the agriculture, IT and biotechnology industries. We will also see that something similar happens in two other cases, Jutland and Wales. In each case, the purest Schumpeter way of innovation –the regional innovation–, thanks to the construction of the train, seems to have been the evolutionary ‘trigger’ from which still consecutive innovations start. The clean technology of California emerges from IT and communication, biotechnology and nanotechnology industries, but also from the contribution of the train to the food industry.