Local capacity, innovative entrepreneurial places and global connections: an overview

The globalisation trend of the past few decades, driven to a large extent by the proliferation of GVCs, has led to a set of significant changes in patterns of technology upgrading and new modes of interaction between domestic technology efforts and external sources of technological knowledge. Whether this new dynamic will lead to continuing increase in the economic importance of emerging economies will ultimately depend on whether their productivity growth will be driven by technology upgrading, requiring active and coordinated activity orchestrated by a variety of state and non-state actors under diverse sectoral, regional and national innovation systems. The new dynamic also reinforces the focus on local–global interfaces which becomes ever more important once we recognize that in the 21st century technology upgrading challenges depend much more on improvements in connectivity and on the industrial ecosystem. Still, the globalization process experienced in the past few decades—reflected in this collection of papers—may need to be recalibrated in the face of the drastic geopolitical changes that the process itself has brought about.