The place of new industries: the case of fuel cell technology and its technological relatedness to regional knowledge bases

The evolutionary turn in economic geography has proposed that regional diversification is a path-dependent process whereby new industries grow out of preexisting industrial structures through technologically related localized knowledge spillover. This paper examines if this also applies for industries developed around emerging radical technology. I develop a new measure for technological relatedness between the knowledge base of the region and that of a radical technology, namely, fuel cells. It is demonstrated that even in the case of a high degree of radicalness and discontinuity, knowledge generation is still cumulative in its spatial and cognitive dimensions, corroborating the evolutionary thesis.