GVCs in Regional Innovation Strategies - a recipe for SMEs in traditional industrial regions? Paper presented at the 7th Seminar on Regional Innovation Policies, Porto, October 2012.

Major crises create quite visible and serious problems for firms and regions. However there is a more or less continuous process of structural change going on, not least due to a globalizing economy. This less often highlighted process poses a number of challenges to regions and local communities. When firms or whole industries are heavily hit by change, windows of opportunity open up. In this paper strategies for SMEs in non-core regions to find new routes of development are particularly looked at. Empirical analyses point at the importance of retaining existing knowledge base, but at the same time search for innovative directions in upgrading and exploiting this knowledge within the given value chain or in coupling with other value chains. The opportunities and challenges in “innoversification” as strategy are analyzed. Findings point at the potential of including a global value chain perspective into regional innovation strategies in identifying more specified and place specific targets in development strategies.