Towards New Avenues for Regional Industries: A Study on Regional Industrial Restructuring

Abstract

The point of departure for this dissertation is the need for many regional industries to change to cope with grand societal challenges. Such industrial restructuring includes changes within existing industries as well as the emergence of new industries. The regional innovation system (RIS) approach highlights the importance of the regional context for developing and utilising new knowledge and innovation enabling regional industrial change. Recent research has combined the RIS approach with insights from evolutionary economic geography (EEG) with the aim of explaining how the pace and direction of new regional industrial development and change. Despite this interest in processes and pre-conditions related to structural change, there is still a knowledge gap concerning how specific patterns of change agency contribute to new regional industrial emergence and change. Further, it is widely acknowledged that RISs need to be reconfigured and become more ‘challenge oriented’ to cope with grand societal challenges, yet there is little empirical evidence on how such processes play out within regional contexts. This dissertation aims to further develop literature on RISs and regional restructuring by exploring the role of regional industrial culture in regional industrial development, emphasizing its significance as an important part of informal institutions within a RIS. Additionally, it contributes to the understanding of how agency influences regional structures and highlights the importance of actors in shaping regional frameworks to support the greening of highly polluting industries and circular strategies like industrial symbiosis. By focusing on cases targeting climate change as a grand societal challenge, it illustrates how regional actors can orient parts of a RIS towards addressing societal challenges, informing regional innovation policies. Finally, it identifies barriers to reorienting RISs, such as regulatory and policy misalignment across different scales of development.

This dissertation comprises four articles, three of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals, while the fourth has been submitted for review. The articles are preceded by a ‘kappa’, which introduces an analytical framework building on central theoretical concepts and main findings and contributions. The kappa also includes the applied methodology and research design. All four articles have included qualitative methods through desk research, and three of the articles also involved semi-structured interviews. The empirical focus of the articles is on five different regions in Norway. The overall contribution of the articles in this dissertation is to deepen our understanding of how regional industrial systems evolve to support existing industries, foster the growth of new industries, and address wider societal challenges. They also provide a foundation for further theoretical advances and empirical studies in this field.