This four-year research programme adopts a cluster and innovation system approach to industrial transformation. Despite some differences, both the cluster and the innovation system concepts take as their starting point in a perspective according to which innovation and industrial dynamic is conceived of as the result of interactions between various actors, and that such interactions evolve over time in some sort of spatially embedded industrial system. Both concepts have, furthermore, in recent years had great impact on industrial, innovation and regional policies in Sweden and beyond. The disciplinary basis of the programme is at the intersection of economic geography, economic history and business studies.
The overall aim of the programme is to conduct empirical research that in various ways evaluate the validity of the claims and statements forwarded in existing clusters and innovations systems research. Broad comparative analyses of selected regional clusters and innovations systems will be combined with analyses that puts to empirical test the received hypotheses about mechanisms and relations that foster innovation and competitiveness (e.g. concerning local interaction between customers and suppliers, rivalry between competing firms, and industry-university collaboration). There will also be studies highlighting the impacts of the functioning of labour markets, and of the strategies of transnational corporations, on local cluster dynamics.