This report contains four case studies which show how innovative economic activity can radically transform an area.

Key findings:

• Regenerating an area doesn’t require building an innovation system from scratch.
• The creation and exploitation of new knowledge don’t have to happen in the same place. New economic and social value is usually the result of a successful adoption-exploitation process rather than creation-exploitation.
• Regions need to invest in three key capacities: the capacities to access external knowledge, to hold it, and spread it in the local economy.
• The collection of essays in this report detail different ways of obtaining these capacities.

This report contains four case studies which show how innovative economic activity can radically transform an area. Rather than trying to create the whole innovation system from scratch, they show that successful regeneration fundamentally involves making the most of existing assets, creating links and exploiting synergy between what is already in place, and then building upon these and plugging the gaps by drawing in resources from outside.

We hope that these four case studies will inspire and encourage policymakers to consider how local innovation policy can adapt to existing local assets and advantages, and to build the wider links necessary to supplement and make the most of these.

Author:

Nesta