Building regional (transformative) resilience by regional innovation policy?

Huiwen Gong and Robert Hassink

Chapter 27 in The New Role of the State for Transformative Innovation, 2026, pp 448-463 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In regional studies and economic geography, interest in regional economic resilience and regional innovation policy has steadily increased in recent decades. Although these two perspectives appear to be closely related, relatively little research has elaborated on the interrelationships between them. In this chapter, the authors take stock of the current two key conceptual extensions of the work on regional economic resilience, i.e.: (1) the simultaneous consideration of regional and value chain resilience; and (2) the discussion on transformative resilience and the normative turn on regional innovation policy in economic geography and beyond. Overall, the authors find that the shift toward more sustainable and inclusive development is increasingly being advocated by scholars working on regional resilience or regional innovation policy, leading to increased interest in new concepts such as “transformative resilience” and “challenge-oriented/transformative regional innovation policy” in the respective research fields. However, there is relatively little evidence on how regional resilience that is transformative in nature (for example, transformative resilience) can be fostered by the new generation of regional innovation policy and how the increasing frequency of shocks of all kinds requires new thinking in regional innovation policy. The authors therefore suggest four promising avenues for future research that link the hitherto largely isolated perspectives of regional resilience and regional innovation policy to explain regional economic change in the post-crisis period.

Keywords: Regional Economic Resilience; Transformative Resilience; Economic Geography; Regional Innovation Policy; Regional Economic Transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781839100253
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