A Knowledge Hub Enabling Regional Innovation Leadership

This chapter provides the basic “architecture” of a knowledge management system enabling innovation at regional level. We here define region as the spatial scale where the everyday exchange of information and ideas is associated with the visibility of specific business agglomerations sharing the same institutional, social and cultural context. Usually, this spatial scale has to do with NUTS III level adopted in the European Union, or more fine-grained ones, at community level. To the extent that organization theorists’ contributions can be translated from business into regional government domain, we introduce the “Region-Enterprise” metaphor, and focus on Regional Innovation Leadership as the “… collective capacity of a regional community to initiate and sustain significant changes to work effectively with forces that shape change …”