Regional innovation systems: development opportunities from the ‘green turn’

The aim of this paper is to investigate the thesis that regional innovation systems are adept at facilitating new demands, notably from ‘platform’ industries or clusters because they may by means of policy instruments catalyse innovations across industry or cluster borders. They facilitate such transversality of knowledge flows because they already learned to integrate Triple Helix interactions and now are able to apply that logic to inter-cluster knowledge interactions. With reference to evidence from the evolution of renewable energy consumer and producer awareness and action, it is suggested that the basic thesis about innovation gains from such regional knowledge spillovers is relatively easy to find in exemplar renewable energy regions. It is concluded that those regions with innovative development agencies of the kind discussed will prosper from tapping new horizontal cross-fertilisation opportunities which are relatively costless and are easily turned into international knowledge portals.

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