摘要
This paper proposes to review and assess social scientific debate about the origins and nature of innovation in modern society. It focuses on three sub-sets of conceptualisation, critique and commentary that refer specifically to sub-national or regional innovation systems. Research in the latter field has grown enormously in recent years. Moreover, new perspectives from other disciplines than regional science have been promoted. One distinctive view of relevance in that it is focused on the role in innovation of specific x2018;entrepreneurial universitiesx2019; in relation to industry and government is, of course, the x2018;Triple Helixx2019; approach. This is reviewed and sympathetically critiqued. A second view, less sympathetically critiqued here, is one that itself attacks all so-called x2018;new regionalismx2019; for stressing the importance of institutions, industry embeddedness and the micro-science of regional economic development. Dazzled by x2018;Globalisation 1x2019; and the totalising power of x2018;scalex2019; geographies, this rejection of the worth of spatial analysis at less than the global or national x2018;scalar envelopex2019; is assessed for its potential insights into weaknesses of the regional innovation systems approach but found wanting in both technical accuracy and scholarly competence. Finally, the state of the art in regional innovation systems research is sketched by reference both to recent longitudinal findings and elaborations into specific technological fields, particularly but not only Bioregional Innovation Systems that help move us towards a newer theory of economic geography in the knowledge economy, based on x2018;regional knowledge capabilities.x2019; The analysis conclusively proposes x2018;Globalisation 2x2019;, a x2018;ground-upx2019; knowledge-driven evolution of the earlier x2018;topx2013;downx2019; multilateral trade institution and corporately driven x2018;Globalisation 1.x2019;