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Learning Regions

The concept of learning regions reflects the rapid economic development in places such as the “Third Italy” (that country's high-technology zone centered on Emilia-Romagna), which drew attention to the importance of cooperation between small- and medium-sized establishments (SMEs) in industrial districts and between firms and local authorities at the regional level in achieving international competitiveness. Theoretically, the idea reflects the view of post-Fordist societies as learning economies, where innovation is seen as a socially and territorially embedded, interactive learning process that cannot be understood independently of its institutional and cultural contexts.

Although these contributions share a common emphasis on the important role of innovation as contextualized social processes of interactive learning, they also disclose interesting differences. One such difference can be identified between the American and European approaches. Learning regions in a North American context are closely associated with the knowledge infrastructure of leading universities and research institutions, which play an essential role in a knowledge-based economy, producing, attracting, and retaining highly skilled workers (e.g., Silicon Valley). In contrast, the focus of learning regions in a European context is more on the role that social capital and trust play in promoting formal and informal interfirm networks and the process of interactive learning (e.g., the industrial districts in the Third Italy). As the differences in these interpretations of learning regions demonstrate, the concept can be fuzzy, and its use both theoretically and practically is rather flexible. To provide an analytically more precise understanding, the next section of this entry identifies three important building blocks of the concept.

Building Blocks of the Concept of Learning Regions

The concept of learning regions has been used in at least three different ways. The notion was originally introduced by economic geographers in the mid 1990s, when they used it to emphasize the role played by cooperation and collective learning in regional clusters and networks to promote the innovativeness and competitiveness of firms and regions. The second approach originates from the writings of evolutionary and institutional economics, where innovation is seen as a socially and territorially embedded, interactive learning process, making knowledge the most fundamental resource and learning the most important process. The third approach, which conceptualizes learning regions as regionally based development coalitions, was developed by organizational researchers taking their knowledge of how to form intrafirm and interfirm learning organizations and applying it at the regional level as a bottom-up, horizontally based cooperation among different actors in a local or regional setting.

When learning regions are defined in this way, they resemble a regional innovation system, incorporating the elements of a bottom-up, interactive innovation model. The innovation system concept can be understood in both narrow and broad ways. A narrow definition of the innovation system primarily incorporates the research and development (R&D) functions of universities, public and private research institutes, and corporations, reflecting a top-down model of innovation. A broader conception of innovation systems includes all aspects of the economic structure and the organizational and institutional context affecting learning and innovation in a region. This type of regional innovation system may be denoted as a “territorially embedded regional innovation system,” in which firms base their innovation activity mainly on localized learning processes stimulated by geographical, social, and cultural proximity, without much direct interaction with knowledge-creating organizations (i.e., R&D institutes and universities).

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