Rethinking Regional Innovation

Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) are understood as a loose alliance of private and public interests, governmental institutions, enterprises and other organizations. RIS are believed to be the cause for the increased competitiveness and productivity in the region. This article challenges the initial rationale and explores an alternative rationale on regional innovation, questioning if the relationship is the other way round: Does the workplace innovation and enterprise development assemble the regional innovation system? The findings introduce the heterogeneity of an enterprise development project at the same time embedded in the concreteness of the workplace innovations and extended beyond the organizational boundaries of the enterprise and the region. The discussions introduce a new and simultaneous rationality of innovation. The contributions to increase competitiveness and productivity become the source of an innovation system and not the result of the regional innovation system. The loose alliance in the innovation system becomes an effect, and not the source, of the efforts to increase competitiveness and productivity.