Regional innovation culture in an age of globalisation - towards culture 2.0?

How can the issue of regional culture be used in analyses of territorial innovation in ways that are not self-evidently flawed? The persistent invocation of ‘culture’ as an explanatory or residual influence in explaining differential territorial outcomes suggests that there is likely to be some variables which should be accounted for. But at the same time, approaches tend to fail to precisely specify culture in ways that do not take it as being exogenous and fixed. This paper argues that this shortcoming results from trying to apply the concept regional culture to explain regions as a bounded systems, and that by relaxing this constraint, and thinking of culture within open and porous systems, it becomes possible to identify how culture might meaningfully operate around territorial innovation at the regional scale, through learning arenas linking local materialist practices with wider epistemic communities. Using a brief illustration drawn from the region of Twente in the Netherlands, focusing on the role of its university as a learning arena, the paper argues that more focus on how learning arenas create regional-scale networks will help to illuminate the influence of regional culture within territorial innovation models.