Disruption, transformation, and innovation in the peripheries

Abstract

However, they are also viewed as necessary ingredients for economic growth and prosperity. It is not surprising, then, that economic geography research on innovation focuses on understanding the preconditions needed to stimulate new enterprise, industry, and knowledge and on how these characteristics of success might be transplanted or encouraged elsewhere, while minimising the displacement of workers in vulnerable regions. Many such studies point to the importance of industry clusters having a critical mass of firms, labour, and institutional thickness to enable knowledge spillovers, global connectivity, and creative buzz (cf. Bathelt et al., 2004;Porter, 1998). But some point to the tautological nature of such findings because of their reliance on case studies of "success" from the core urban economies. Peripheral economies are, by corollary, seen as deficit or disadvantaged because they do not host the suite of characteristics-the factors of location, the economic agents, the institutional backers, and the output profiles-believed intrinsic to a successful, innovative regional economy (Shearmur et al., 2016). Such conclusions then deflect interest from disruptive, transformative, and innovative activities in the peripheries.This special section joins a growing body of work that adopts a different stance. Our collection of articles foregrounds the characteristics of the periphery, and asks both how they might promote innovation and whether understanding the dynamics of peripheral economies might indeed aid our understanding of the core.