Regional Innovation System Policy: a Knowledge-based Approach

A focus on constructing regional advantage requires an ‘unpacking’ of what makes territorial agglomerations important for innovation and growth by disclosing and revealing the contingencies, particularities and specificities of the various contexts and environments where knowledge creation, innovation and entrepreneurship take place. In order to achieve more effective regional innovation policy, the paper presents and discusses five dimensions along which such unpacking can take place. These dimensions refer to different perspectives that originate in different industrial knowledge bases, different territorial competence bases, the distributed knowledge base, the importance of creative knowledge environments and different institutional frameworks.