Actors of change for regional renewal: Roles and Characteristics. The case of IoT in Toulouse

Joan Crespo
University of Toulouse
Tuesday, 22 May 2018 - 12:00

New path creation to diversify the regional economy is acknowledged to be fun- damental processes to achieve sustainable regional development. However, despite the fact that new pathways are not created by disembodied economic forces, the role of the actors involved in new development paths, the so called actors of change, remains understudied. This papers contribute to fill this gap. It offers an analytical framework to characterize different processes of path creation depending on the features of the actors of change involved, and the roles they are playing. Then we link these different processes to different types of new regional paths. We show that multiple configuration of the actors’ type role space give rise to different path cre- ation processes, and not all of them are equally adapted to generate certain types of new regional paths. We empirically illustrate this with the case of Toulouse and the development of a new regional path around Internet of Things (IoT), a nascent technological domain.

Place: 

Ciudad Politécnica de la Innovación
Edificio 8E, Acceso J, Planta 4ª (Sala Descubre. Cubo Rojo)
Universitat Politècnica de València | Camino de Vera s/n

Short CV: 

Joan Crespo is researcher in Economic Geography at the LEREPS (University of Toulouse). He holds a MA on Industrial Relations and Knowledge Dynamics and a PhD on Economics (University of Toulouse). The research interests of Dr. Crespo are on cluster evolution, regional resilience, economics of innovation, and knowledge networks. Within these fields, he has addressed important aspects about collaborative strategies of firms, the structural conditions for regional renewal and the design of more efficient cluster policies. He has been involved in several international projects such ORA-ANR 2012 Territorial Resilience or FP7 Smart Specialization 2014, and he has also elaborated policy reports for the EU Commission.