The role of firm-level actors and system-level actors in processes of new regional industrial path development

Abstract

This doctoral thesis departs from the understanding that regional industrial restructuring is important for handling challenges, such as globalisation, sustainability and digitalisation. Regional industrial restructuring can include changes in the existing industry as well as the development of completely new industries. The combination of the regional innovation system (RIS) approach and the theory on new path development, emerging from evolutionary economic geography (EEG) literature, leads to an understanding that industrial development happens within (open) regional systems. RISs consist of actors and networks that are embedded in an institutional framework. While one of the critiques of the RIS approach has been that it focuses too much on the system and not enough on its actors and their agency, the primary critique of the EEG approach is that it has an aggregated firm focus. This thesis addresses these criticisms by focusing more in-depth on the different actors within the regional innovation system and the interaction between them. One way this is done is by differentiating between firm-level actors and systemlevel actors. This research also focuses on the various ways these two groups of actors contribute, such as by building cross-industry innovation capability and through an entrepreneurial discovery process, to change the RIS and influence new industrial path development. These different paths lead to different forms of regional economic restructuring.