Regional Differences, Differential Development and Generative Regional Growth

What are the preconditions for the industrialisation of a region? What factors provide the changes in technology, social and economic organisation, and policy-making that transform a region from a more traditional state of existence to modern industrialisation? We wish to address ourselves to the conceptualisation of the processes by which these factors become part of the transformation phenomenon. In this context, generic developments of new technologies, institutions, etc., are being viewed as innovations. Their emergence represents an evolutionary process, e.g. like mutations in the genes, which through their selection succeed in the relevant space and time. This intellectual approach lends itself easily to an analogy between the natural economy (sociobiology) and the political economy (urban and industrial economics), as suggested ‘by terminological pairs like species/industry, mutation/innovation, mutualism/exchange, and evolution/progress’.1