Geography Reference
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of emerging industries, but once they become established, institutions may obstruct
their further development because of inertia and hysteresis (Martin and Sunley, 2006;
Setteri eld, 1997).
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Institutional change is therefore required not only to enable the emer-
gence of new industries, but also to revive mature industries. We still have little under-
standing of the conditions under which regions or countries are more likely to adapt their
institutions to seize opportunities provided by new sectors, and under what conditions
institutional adaptation fails to take place (Maskell and Malmberg, 2007).
In Chapter 20, Eike Schamp takes up this issue but in a much broader sense. He
explores how the notion of co-evolution may be fruitfully applied in evolutionary eco-
nomic geography. According to Schamp, the notion of co-evolution has often been used
in economic geography in a rather narrative and loose sense. Following Malerba's work,
he argues there is a strong need to identify what is co-evolving, and to be more specii c
about the reciprocal causalities between the co-evolving entities that are analysed. In
this context, Schamp discusses several empirical topics that focus on co-evolutionary
processes: the simultaneous growth of connected sectors, the co-evolution of sectors and
institutions, and the creation of a region as a supporting environment.
In this context, Robert Hassink explores in Chapter 21 the relationship between lock-
in and regional development. While studies in economic geography tend to emphasise
the positive ef ects of geographical clustering on growth, Hassink elaborates on the
idea that clusters may also end up in a state of negative lock-in (see also Hassink, 2005;
Hassink and Shin, 2005; Schamp, 2005). In his contribution, Hassink makes the case that
the emergence and persistence of these negative ef ects can be well explained by an evo-
lutionary economic geography approach. Empirical cases of divergent experiences in old
industrial regions in Germany and South Korea are discussed to show: (1) why in some
old industrial regions strong lock-ins are found, and in other industrial areas weak lock-
ins; and (2) how regional lock-ins may be caused by (institutional) structures at dif erent
spatial levels, including the national and supra-national level.
While many institutions are heavily inl uenced by the state, what is still missing though
is a systematic view on the state that is well grounded in evolutionary thinking (see, for
example, Metcalfe, 1994; Pelikan and Wegner, 2003). To an increasing extent, there are
contributions that specify how evolutionary economic geography may inform regional
innovation policy (see, among others, Asheim et al., 2006; Boschma, 2009; Lambooy and
Boschma, 2001; Nooteboom and Stam, 2008; Raspe and Van Oort, 2006; Shapiro and
Fuchs, 2005; Tödtling and Trippl, 2005; Van Geenhuizen and Nijkamp, 2006). What
these approaches tend to argue is that region-specii c contexts provide opportunities
but also set limits to what can be achieved by public policy. Consequently, policy action
should avoid 'one-size-i ts-all' and 'picking-the-winner' policies. Instead of copying
best practices or selecting winners, policy should take the history of a region as a start-
ing point, and identify regional potentials and bottlenecks accordingly. To avoid the
problem of regional lock-in, Nooteboom and Stam (2008), among others, have argued
that public policy should stimulate the entry of newcomers, encourage new policy experi-
ments, and enhance the establishment of extra-regional linkages.
Another pending issue is how to incorporate institutions in a more quantitative
evolutionary framework. Institutions have been mainly (though not entirely) exam-
ined in economic geography by using qualitative, descriptive case studies. Boschma
and Frenken (2009a) have expressed the need for studies on institutions and regional
