Contrasting Regional Innovation Systems in Oxford and Cambridge

This opening epigraph by Cooke and Morgan encapsulates recent thinking on regional innovation systems. While national regulatory frameworks in their broadest sense provide the overall operating context, the regional or local environment is where firms live and learn. This is also the geographical scale at which the nexus of actions by individuals, business intermediaries, universities, and society can make a difference to the evolution of economic development. Thus the world is composed of a’ hierarchical mosaic of densely-developed regional economies with specific resource endowments, assets, institutions, co-ordination mechanism, know-how, rules of conduct and cognitive frameworks’ (Asheim and Dunford 1997,451). The specific characteristics of regions arise from the interaction of geo-historical events, and increasingly by ‘the elaboration of new forms of globalization in the organisation of industrial activity’ (Amin 1993, 447).