Developing transnational industrial platforms: – the strategic conception of the Öresund region

Abstract: This book is particularly concerned with examining the creation of the Öresund region, a process that represents the internationalization and geopolitical changes in the world, where new industrial regions emerge in competition for growth and wealth. The emerging Öresund region is a new type of industrial region – a transnational region that is difficult to analyze in a traditional way, for example, by a structural economic analysis. Instead, its main concern is to systematically examine the strategic process that determines the characteristics of a future industrial region in terms of local resource bases, knowledge integration, collective learning and regional core competencies. This book addresses several important questions. How are industrial regions created today? How are they defined? How is their international competitiveness achieved? What problems and opportunities follow in the wake of industrial regional development across national borders? How do cultures and traditional activity patterns influence such processes? How is a regional industrial strategy developed? A comprehensive in-depth analysis of the Öresund region, mainly based on an extensive amount of data covering the development from the 17th century until today, is used to explore the creation process of this new transnational industrial region. A comparison with the Hong Kong-Guangdong and the Singapore-Johor-Riau regions is made in order to develop a new conceptual framework – the RIP- (regional industrial platform) perspective. This is done as an abductive case study where the analytical approach has focused on intentions and activity patterns of institutional agents and the use of metaphors as central elements in the social construction of the region. By viewing the regionalization process as the strategic formation process of an industrial platform, a methodological and conceptual understanding is reached of how the industrial region as a whole is created over time. Thus, this study provides important insights into the development of transnational industrial regions. It is shown that transnational regionalization processes in general are not only driven by market forces and strong policies, but that they can also be conceptdriven and that these region concepts in particular have a persuasive effect on local industry-related activities – they become the soil of the industrial region.