Seeding patterns: the sources of regional diversification

Relatedness has been largely acknowledged as a major driver of regional diversification: new industries grow out of technologically related industries by means of combinatorial knowledge dynamics and branching processes. However, by emphasizing the role of firms and entrepreneurs in new path creation, evolutionary scholars have not only underplayed the role of extra-regional actors, linkages and networks, but also the role of national state strategies and wider political economic relations. The research seeks to advance our knowledge and evidence about regional industrial diversification by tackling specific gaps in the literature in three distinct but interdependent contributions. The first paper proposes a systematization of the debate on related vs. unrelated diversification, with a focus on the latter and its implications for uneven regional development and sustainability transitions. The second paper analyses the role of two sets of drivers, namely technological relatedness and innovation policies, on the emergence of new Revealed Technological Advantages in the United States (1981-2010), providing evidence for both drivers by means of econometric estimations. The third paper deploys the concept of «related variety», as formulated by Boschma (2005) and Frenken, van Oort and Verburg (2007), to verify if well-diversified and interdependent creative industries determine more pronounced local creative employment growth in the Italian provinces (2008-2010), with corroborating findings.