Abstract EN:

This thesis concerns the relations between industrial innovation and regional growth. From a static point of view, the considerable diversity observed in this relationship can be understand as resulting from the variety of sources of external economies and from the diverse forms of coordination required for the firms to reap them. Dynamically, the analysis focuses on the learning processes taking places among firms and which shape the growth of technologies and the accumulation of knowledge in the region. It deals with the conditions for the emergence and the diffusion of the codes and representations through which local firms succeed in interpreting and deepening the knowledge produced in the local environment. The diffusion of those shared representations of the knowledge innovations a condition for the firms to reap the technological external economies available in the agglomeration. Such an approach innovations empirically illustrated through an historical account of the concentration of computer and software industries in the Boston area, and their specialisation on some professional segments of the markets.