Drawing on a rich literature and case study material from selected industries, and elaborating on key concepts such as firms and competencies, industries and industrial systems, and competitiveness and prosperity, this book sets out to answer three broad research questions: * What is competition about in today's economy? * Why do geographical areas (local milieus, cities, regions, countries) specialize in particular types of economic activity, and why do patterns of specialization, once in place tend to be so tremendously durable? * How can high-cost regions in general and small industrialized countries in particular sustain competitiveness and prosperity in an increasingly globally integrated world economy? This book points the way out of a dilemma created by recent industrial theory and policy: is it possible for countries which are not destined to be leading high-tech powers to take advantage of the current conjuncture of increasingly open-markets.

The learning region has become an important concept among scholars, managers and policymakers. Companies are more and more stimulated by and dependent on the unevenly distributed localized capabilities that enhance learning and innovation. Learning regions are a contemporary consequence of the way companies react to the global opening of markets. The aim of this book is to investigate the regional linkages between learning and competitiveness using the North-European Oresund Region as an illustrative case. In the year 2000, the 16 kilometre long bridge and tunnel will be completed between the cities of Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmo in Sweden, significantly improving the accessibility within an area of thousands of companies and a concentration of research facilities, technological and commercial expertise and educational institutions unsurpassed in Northern Europe.

It is by now an established fact that the so-called high technology industries have experienced growth rates way above average through most years. High technology industries' share of the world manufacturers export has risen from 12 percent in 1970 to 25 percent in 1995. More than one-third of Japan's manufacturing export and more than 40 percent of America's manufacturing export are products from high technology industries, and this development has increasingly led to an international obsession with high technology industries. In a number of countries R&D indicators have by now become the object of intense discussions. Great efforts are devoted to improve a bad relative standing. The aim of this paper is to question whether a national specialization towards high technology industries is the only way by which the mature, developed countries can hope to sustain and augment their economic position. I claim that in contrast to much of the assumptions in contemporary politics and in the majority of the contemporary academic literature on the subject, the countries without a specialization in high technology industries are not left in the backwaters of economic development. Quite the contrary seems to be the case as many advanced, high-cost countries experience an above average economic performance even when specializing in the bottom end of the low-tech industries. The argument is illustrated with empirical material from the wooden furniture industry in general--and the rather successful Danish wooden furniture industry in particular. The possible reasons behind this apparent paradox are discussed.