Regional innovation and human capability: Developing a comprehensive framework

Discussions about "regional innovation" invariably imply that some processes of knowledge formation, both generating and sharing, are essential to the development of effective regional systems. Concepts like "learning region" and "knowledge city" promote the importance of people's knowledge and skills, even while they focus on wider systemic issues related to inter-firm linkages, governance arrangements, investment challenges or global markets. Typically, however, the discussion of the relevance of knowledge and skills tends to address a specific issue, such as university business linkages, knowledge spillovers, or perhaps the importance of a university campus, as though that particular issue alone would shape the effectiveness or otherwise of the knowledge dimension of the innovation system. This paper suggests that developing a comprehensive framework for human capability in a region would contribute considerably to understanding how knowledge and skills contribute to regional innovation. The term "human capability" is used to avoid the narrow construction of "human capital" in terms of educational achievement, and would encompass both institutional and informal processes for generating knowledge and for developing and applying skill. It is intended also to capture the agency that is implicit in the apparent learning process of regional innovation. The human capability framework would encompass learning processes across all ages, and examine how skill is developed and applied in different contexts. Such a framework could be applied to evaluating the appropriateness and effectiveness of the human capability in relation to a particular regional innovation system. It draws on the work of the OECD, other researchers, and case studies in which the author has been involved.