The Regional Development Platform and “Related Variety”: Some Evidence from Art and Food in Tuscany

A recent contribution to the regional/local development is the regional development platform (RDP), a tool of local policy and governance meant for the planning and implementation of a regional innovation system (RIS) with a sustainable and long-lasting competitive advantage. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on local economic development through platforms of regional development, offering some specific cases in which the RDP model is developed not only as a top-down policy tool in support of innovation, but also as a bottom-up governance tool for the relationships among cognitively related industries. We introduce the case of an art and food platform in Maremma (south of Tuscany, Italy), where the related-variety approach is mainly focused on cross-fertilization among related and unrelated resources and sectors and is specifically applied to a rural area.