Regional Development and Conditions for Innovation in the Network Society looks at fundamental changes at the start of the new millennium as innovation is gaining increasing importance for local economic prosperity and the emergence of learning societies. While much attention has been devoted to information and communication technologies, this analysis shows that innovation infrastructures should be understood as a broad framework for social and economic activities that transcends any specific technology and should be tied to attitudes and behaviors oriented towards the exploitation of change by adding value. This work builds on the idea of inclusive learning, which entails a process of shared prosperity across the globe following local-specific conditions. Inclusive learning also argues that it is crucial tounder stand the features of knowledge-induced growth in rich countries, as well as the challenges and opportunities for late-industrialized and less developed countries. To achieve these objectives, the relative importance of infrastructures and incentives is considered an increasingly important role in institutions towards the development of social capital. Learning societies will increasingly rely on "distributed knowledge bases," as a systematically coherent set of knowledge, maintained across an economically and/or socially integrated set of agents and institutions.
Marina van Geenhuizen is a professor at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and OTB Research Institute, in Delft, The Netherlands. Alejandro Ibarra-Yunez is a professor of Economics and Public Policy at Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Mexico. Manuel V. Heitor is the former Director of the Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, IN+. He has co-edited several books and authored several scientific papers. Currently, his interests include the management of technology and the development of engineering and innovation policies, including higher education policies. In this context, he has led the organizing committee in a series of international conferences on "Technology Policy and Innovation," which began in 1997 in Macau. He is also on the editorial board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change and has published several papers in international refereed journals, including Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, Higher Education Policy and Science and Public Policy.
