Creating regional cultures of innovation? The regional innovation strategies in England and Scotland

The Regional Innovation Strategies (RISs), recently published for three UK regions, provide a useful measure of the development of some key themes in the economic policy content of the 'new regionalism'. National and supra-national economic policy agencies have been applying strong top-down policy pressure to encourage regional institutions to adopt innovation-oriented strategies and, in England at least, new regional development agencies created new opportunities to deliver such strategies. The RISs, published in 1998 and 1999, were modestly resourced but, because of the subject matter and timing, turned out to be very influential in shaping the content of emerging regional economic policies. The three RISs described here, for Strathclyde, in Scotland, and the West Midlands and Yorkshire and Humberside regions of England, were the UK components of a broader programme to improve the competitiveness of EU regions through the promotion of innovation. This article explores the processes for producing the RISs and the variation in their strategy content, in the context of wider policies. Questions are raised about the ability of mechanisms such as RIS to deliver hoped-for boosts to regional 'cultures of innovation' and, in particular, to what extent the three cases studies provide evidence about the viability of the 'new regionalism'.