Mariachiara Barzotto, University of Bath

Jennifer Clark, The Ohio State University

AI is increasingly understood as an emerging enabling technology with potentially far-reaching implications for regional development. As both an industry in its own right and a technology increasingly integrated across incumbent sectors, AI has the potential to reshape production systems, innovation dynamics, regional governance, and the organisation of economic activity across space. Its growth raises important questions about technological change, the spatial organisation of new industries, the evolving practices of regional development, and the transformation of existing sectors.

AI may also be understood as a technology that influences how knowledge is produced, legitimised, and acted upon. In this sense, its significance extends beyond industrial transformation alone: AI may also affect how regions are governed and planned. This perspective resonates with long-standing debates in Regional Studies on technological change, digitalisation, and place-based adaptation, where innovation has been shown to reshape both regional economic trajectories and the institutional capacities through which development is pursued.

There is growing interest in Regional Studies in identifying the regional implications of new technologies, such as AI as a platform technology integrated across incumbent industries. Recent scholarship has begun to engage some of these issues, including its role in green technology specialisation, global innovation systems and industrial rise, new path creation, and the role of system-building agency in new path creations. Yet these discussions remain fragmented across literatures, empirical domains, and scales of analysis. This Special Issue seeks to advance a more coherent research agenda that examines AI simultaneously as an emerging industry, as a tool and infrastructure of regional development governance, and as an enabling technology whose diffusion may alter the spatial organisation of existing sectors.

The Call for Papers invites conceptually robust, empirically grounded, and methodologically rigorous contributions that examine the regional development implications of AI as an emerging enabling technology. Contributions may address the economic geography of the AI industry, the effects of AI on the governance, administration, and planning of regional development, and the ways in which the diffusion and adoption of AI across incumbent sectors may reshape patterns of agglomeration, dispersion, and regional economic change.

Potential topics

• The economic geography of the AI industry: spatial organisation of AI production, agglomeration and dispersion patterns, factors determining spatial organisation (skills, capital, infrastructure, energy, regulatory regimes)
• AI and the governance of regional development: impact on administration and management, effects on decision-making processes and outcomes, changes to regional development and planning practices (citizen engagement, public administration, systems optimisation, transportation)
• AI diffusion and the restructuring of incumbent industries: how adoption alters regional geography of other sectors, substitution effects with other technologies, new patterns of concentration or dispersion, analogues from previous enabling technologies

Timeline

• October 16, 2026: Abstract deadline
• December 1, 2026: Full manuscript deadline

Guendalina Anzolin, University of Cambridge

Simon Collinson, Zhejiang University

Federica Rossi, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Elvira Uyarra, University of Manchester

Over the past two decades, the advent of digital technologies, the pressing need to shift productive structures towards greener systems, as well as recessions due to the Global Financial Crisis, Covid-19 and recent geopolitical tensions have increased the challenges for regions' structural transformation process. At the same time, organisations try to keep pace with increasingly rapid innovation processes by embracing open innovation and co-creation practices. These dynamics have opened a space for public intervention, to solve issues and to coordinate a growing number of stakeholders and activities related to innovation and industrial capabilities.

One of the ways in which governments can intervene is through the funding of innovation intermediaries (IIs). IIs can be organisations of several kinds, such as research and technology organisations, incubators, innovation centres, technopoles, knowledge-intensive business-services providers. They translate early-stage innovation into scale-up and usable products or processes, and they are key in orchestrating innovation and knowledge transfer by filling gaps along the innovation cycles, through the organisation of complex networks of players to solve complex problems. IIs increasingly act as market architects by shaping demand, standards, and regulatory frameworks that enable the emergence of new markets. The emergence of IIs as key actors in the process calls for in-depth analyses of the role, functions and activities that IIs play for regional development.

IIs are key players within regional ecosystems and are increasingly in a position to engage in regional restructuring and diversification processes. Even when IIs do not have an explicit regional mandate, they participate in a dynamic local ecosystem where institutional, technological and economic linkages evolve and shape the regional context. The structure of the ecosystem itself influences the design and the functioning of IIs and it is pivotal to support the processes of knowledge search and generation that IIs are supposed to contribute to. IIs can actively contribute to related and unrelated diversification processes and leverage their role as knowledge repositories, shapers and facilitators within and across industrial value chain structures in different ecosystems.

Effective regional development requires not just any institutions, but the right configurations and capacities in those institutions to adapt to a changing context. By examining IIs, this Special Issue aims to observe institutional work in action – how these organisations evolve new practices to meet emerging challenges like digitalisation or decarbonization. It also intends to provide further theoretical understandings of key concepts, such as the functions of IIs within an ecosystem, specifically addressing what the unique features of IIs and their functions are in the innovation life cycle and within the ecosystem where they operate.

This Special Issue invites conceptual, empirical and policy-focused papers that unpack the interrelations between evolving innovation IIs and regional economic change. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary approaches bridging economic geography, innovation studies, operations management, industrial economics and public policy, as well as studies based on qualitative or quantitative methods and mixed-method designs that combine qualitative case work with large-scale datasets. We also aim to include papers that cover a variety of empirical settings.

Potential topics

• Analyse how different configurations of IIs foster knowledge transfer, upgrade value chains and enable regional diversification or resilience
• Analyse what are the structural conditions (i.e., institutional, economic, production and technology related) that lead to the emergence of specific types of IIs
• Investigate how IIs shape – and are shaped by – place-based, mission-oriented or smart-specialisation policies
• Explore how IIs support regional sustainability goals, including decarbonization, circular economy initiatives, and the integration of social and environmental objectives into innovation strategies
• Explore the role of IIs as orchestrators of human-capital formation and labour-market transitions
• Examine how the activities, governance and revenue structures of IIs have adapted to new technological waves (e.g. digital or green transitions) and to changing public-private funding landscapes
• Analyse the impact of policy interventions on IIs in specific ecosystems (or comparing different regional ecosystems)
• Explore the different activities and functions that IIs perform depending on the sectoral needs, segments of the value chain and size of the firm
• Investigate how IIs contribute to market formation processes, including the creation of standards, certification schemes, and demand articulation for emerging technologies
• Develop novel typologies or metrics that capture the dynamic functions of IIs within regional innovation systems

Timeline

• June 30, 2026: Abstract deadline
• December 31, 2026: Manuscript deadline