Patrick Cohendet, HEC Montréal

Bastian Lange, Université Humboldt de Berlin

Elke Schüßler, Université Leuphana de Lüneburg

Laurent Simon, HEC Montréal

Timeline

• October 31, 2026: Deadline for paper submission

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

David Morris, University of Nottingham

Carlo Corradini, University of Reading

Lisa De Propris, University of Birmingham

Duygu Buyukyazici, London School of Economics and Political Science

Skills are central to regional development, influencing labour markets, industrial evolution, and economic trajectories. Yet despite their long-standing recognition, regional skills are often under-theorised and frequently conflated with education, human capital, or occupational structures. Conceptual frameworks that treat skills as multidimensional, place-based capabilities that emerge from the interactions of people, firms, and local institutions remain limited, and systematic empirical evidence on skill formation, mismatch, mobility, and utilisation across regions is still sparse. Meanwhile, rapid skill-biased technological change, digitalisation, and green transitions are reshaping jobs, tasks, and production systems, altering regional skill demands, reinforcing divergence in development paths, and raising urgent policy questions.

Building on emerging conceptual and empirical work, this Special Issue seeks to advance understanding of regional skills as active, context-dependent capabilities, and their role in economic transformation. We invite conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore how regional skills are formed, adapted, deployed, and leveraged to support regional development, labour market inclusion, and industrial transformation. Submissions may address advanced, emerging, and developing economies, and analyses may cover sub-regional to supra-regional scales.

The Special Issue encourages early-career researchers and scholars from underrepresented regions, including the Global South, to submit contributions. We welcome both qualitative and quantitative studies, conceptual and theoretical analyses, as well as case studies that provide new insights into the formation and utilisation of regional skills. All submissions should ground their analysis in place-based contexts and address implications for theory, practice, or policy.

Potential topics

• The nature and dynamics of regional skills formation and transformation due to technological change (skills creation, resilience, obsolescence, disappearance)
• The links between education, skills transformation and job dynamics in the green and digital transitions of regional economies
• The drivers and barriers of a regional skills transition for the innovation, growth and resilience of regional economies
• The regional skill mismatch and skill formation in new labour spaces, e.g. green jobs, remote working, new platformised digital industries, gig economy
• The enablers and barriers of a regional skills transformation for the green and digital transitions of industrial clusters and regional economies
• Regional skills transformation and mismatch within shifting regional labour markets
• Regional skills transformation and mismatch in regions as open economies: skills mobility, remote skills and migration
• The opportunities and constraints of stranded and stressed regions: left-behindedness, regional low-skill traps, transitioning carbon-intensive regions
• The links between vocational education, lifelong training and on-the-job upskilling and regional skills transition in the context of technological change
• The opportunities and constraints of regional skills transition in emerging and developing economies
• Policy debates and policy experiences to address the regional dimension of skill mismatch, skill formation and skill transition for just and inclusive growth

Timeline

• June 12, 2026: Abstract deadline
• September 25, 2026: 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

Max Roessler, University of Greifswald

Crhistian Joel González-Cuatianquis, Gran Sasso Science Institute

Stefania Fiorentino, University of Cambridge

Grete Gansauer, University of Wyoming

Recent political developments related to place-based feelings of discontent and left-behindness draw urgent attention toward building scholarly understanding of the emotional, discursive, and narrative dimensions of contemporary regional inequality. The rise of populist movements, growing anti-establishment sentiment, and regional polarization in the US, Europe and other parts of the world have motivated scholarly and policy action toward not only understanding the root causes of such dynamics, but also policy strategies to equalize socioeconomic prosperity in places perceived as 'left behind'. As political attitudes harboured in 'left behind' places propel electoral shifts, spatial divides, and declining trust in political institutions, there is a need for research on how regional disparities materialise in, through and with regard to distinct places. In particular, there is a need to (re)consider how policy solutions meant to address territorial inequalities can take the deeply rooted feelings, perceptions, and spatial imaginaries of 'left behind' places and peripheralized regions into account.

This Special Issue particularly addresses the significance of the perceptual dimension. We invite contributions which examine the role of spatial imaginaries, narratives, regional visions, identities, emotional geographies and effects associated with regional inequality and their interrelationship with policy responses as part of an 'ideational turn' within Regional Studies. By focusing on regional actors' perceptions and perceived regional futures, the SI explores the intersection of the feelings and material conditions influencing 'left-behindness' and the policies designed to address it.

This Special Issue highlights international spatial variations and manifestations of left-behindness and their interdependencies with psychological perceptions and local cultural embeddedness. By discussing the broader material and structural conditions of 'left-behindness', the Special Issue shifts the focus to the perceptual dimension and the role of spatial imaginaries, examining the subjective, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of left-behindness at different territorial levels. It aims to explore how narratives, imaginaries, and historical preconditions shape local identities, feelings of exclusion, and thus visions of regional futures. The Special Issue will welcome studies that offer new ways of thinking about left-behind places and political discontent, moving beyond economic metrics to explore the emotional, symbolic, and narrative dimensions that shape and are shaped by spatial inequalities and regional futures. All contributions should ground their analysis in regional and place-based context, ensuring coherence with the journal's mission and spatial focus.

The guest editorial team particularly encourages early-career scholars in geography, regional studies, public and regional policy, and related fields, bringing fresh perspectives to the discussion under the high publishing standards of Regional Studies. Furthermore, submissions examining perceptions of 'left behind-ness' from the Global South are encouraged. Conceptual, theoretical and empirical submissions, both qualitative and quantitative, as well as case studies from different regions in the world are welcome.

Potential topics

• Theorisations and empirical examples of perceived left-behindness
• Construction of narratives and imaginaries of and within 'left behind regions'
• Significance of regional identities, histories, or social memories within peripheralized places for perceptions of the future
• Material effects of spatial imaginaries, emotional associations of marginality, or feelings of discontent/left-behind-ness on regional development policy and planning
• Epistemological assumptions and methodologies to examine imaginaries, narratives and visions within 'left behind' places and policy
• Policy responses and best-practice examples to tackle feelings of perceived left-behindness, and/or empowering local agencies, contrasting feelings of neglect and institutional mistrust
• The commonalities and differences of spatial imaginaries and perceptions of left-behindness across a variety of geographies (e.g., Global North versus Global South)

Timeline

• February 28, 2026: Extended abstract deadline
• September 11, 2026: Full manuscript submission deadline

Meena Chavan, Macquarie University

Christina Theodoraki, IAE Aix-Marseille University

Michelle Evans, University of Melbourne

Jane Menzies, University of Sunshine Coast

Anna Earl, University of Canterbury

Alex Maritz, La Trobe University

Bella Galperin, University of Tampa

Indigenous entrepreneurs worldwide are building ventures that intertwine economic ambition with cultural stewardship, together with sustainability and community well-being. These enterprises often act as engines of sustainable regional development even as they emerge from contexts of profound social, political, and economic marginalization. Many Indigenous communities continue to grapple with colonial legacies such as land dispossession, systemic exclusion, and racism that hinder their development. In the face of these historic injustices, Indigenous entrepreneurs have had to devise business strategies that double as acts of resilience and cultural survival.

Indigenous entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon, not confined to Anglophone settler societies. This Special Issue broadens the geographic lens to include insights from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond. Pre-Columbian trade networks across the Americas show that Indigenous peoples engaged in extensive commerce long before colonial contact. Today, Indigenous enterprises in regions like the Andes, Amazon, Himalayas, Sahel, and Arctic carry forward these traditions, adapting them to modern markets. Examples range from Māori-owned film production companies in New Zealand and Maya ecotourism cooperatives in Guatemala, to Sámi reindeer-herding tech startups in Scandinavia and Maasai craft and safari ventures in East Africa, to music and dance companies in Australia. Across such ventures, entrepreneurs leverage deep cultural knowledge in diverse sectors.

Many Indigenous businesses are necessity-driven, launched to create livelihoods amid poverty or neglect, yet they also represent proactive efforts to assert self-determination. Rural Sámi entrepreneurs in northern Europe balance dual roles as cultural preservers and innovators. They offer traditional foods and crafts alongside high-tech services like GPS reindeer tracking and even video games based on Sámi folklore. These heritage-based enterprises foster community resilience. By integrating cultural values into business, they sustain their languages, arts, and ecological knowledge for future generations. Indigenous entrepreneurship is not just about pursuing profit under adversity but also about healing communities and revitalizing cultures.

Entrepreneurial activities are deeply embedded in specific socio-spatial contexts, shaping and being shaped by the places and communities in which they occur. Studies of rural entrepreneurship demonstrate how local embeddedness and networks enable opportunity creation in peripheral regions. Indigenous enterprises are often closely tied to particular lands, ecosystems, and social networks. Scholars have described such deeply embedded venture creation as 'entrepreneuring,' an embodied, collective process rather than a static economic outcome. This view aligns with broader understandings of the entrepreneurial process as socially constructed, involving social interaction, identity, emotion, and community practices.

Focusing on Indigenous enterprise brings issues of sustainability and socio-spatial justice to the fore. New ventures can promote not only economic growth but also social inclusion and environmental stewardship in their regions. Indigenous entrepreneurship exemplifies this integrative mission, inherently blending economic and social objectives. Yet the field of Indigenous entrepreneurship research remains emergent and fragmented, often confined to highly specific cultural contexts and a few geographic areas. This fragmentation calls for theoretical integration and broader comparative perspectives.

Many Indigenous entrepreneurs operate in marginal spaces, isolated reserves, and ancestral territories where formal infrastructure may be weak but social capital, cultural meaning, and local knowledge are strong. The notion of 'place-based entrepreneurship' is central: Indigenous entrepreneurs leverage deep connections to place as a resource for innovation and differentiation. Their ventures often aim to revitalize local economies while reinforcing socio-cultural ties to the land.

Indigenous entrepreneurship intersects strongly with sustainability and social enterprise themes. Many Indigenous ventures pursue a 'triple bottom line' of economic, social, and environmental goals. Indigenous entrepreneurs orient their ventures toward not just financial gain but also cultural and communal outcomes. These include stewardship of natural resources, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and community well-being, all crucial aspects of sustainable development. Many Indigenous businesses function as community-based or social enterprises at heart, redefining success beyond profit maximization.

Conventional entrepreneurship models often fail Indigenous peoples. These models have been described as suffering from 'cultural captivity' of entrepreneurship paradigms, and there is a need for approaches that embed entrepreneurship in community development and cultural continuity. The Special Issue pushes the theoretical frontier by challenging mainstream entrepreneurship and management theories to broaden into more inclusive, community-centric frameworks.

The political economy of Indigenous entrepreneurship must be considered within broader institutional contexts and regional innovation systems. Historically, many Indigenous businesses have been under-supported or even undermined by government policies, market dynamics, and external stakeholders. Power imbalances and marginalization have directly shaped entrepreneurial opportunities. Indigenous founders frequently face systemic barriers reflecting structural inequities. Many Indigenous ventures struggle with lack of access to capital and financing, exclusion from mainstream supply chains and markets, and misappropriation or theft of cultural products and intellectual property.

There is growing recognition that empowering marginalized entrepreneurs can transform regional economies and foster more inclusive growth. Cultivating Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems can yield dual economic and social benefits in regions. By anchoring Indigenous entrepreneurship research in core conversations of Entrepreneurship & Regional Development on context, sustainability, and inequality, this Special Issue aims to enrich those discussions and advance Indigenous entrepreneurship as a field of inquiry.

Indigenous entrepreneurship has received limited attention in mainstream business research, often treated as a niche topic or viewed only through narrow lenses. Where it has been studied, research frequently centered on how extractive industries affect Indigenous communities or on fitting Indigenous businesses into existing paradigms. This Special Issue proposes a different framing: Indigenous entrepreneurship should be understood on its own terms, as a driver of innovation, resilience, and sustainability in regional economies. Indigenous businesses play pivotal roles in their local economies and social landscapes, and developing these ventures often requires novel approaches that integrate cultural values with enterprise development.

Many Indigenous ventures explicitly pursue social and cultural development objectives alongside economic goals. These objectives are inherently place-based: Indigenous entrepreneurs seek not only profit but also to improve community well-being and to act as stewards of land and culture within their regions. Māori filmmakers in New Zealand's screen industry balance commercial success with cultural storytelling, enriching both their industry and the region's cultural vitality. Indigenous enterprises in Australia integrate community development aims—education, health, employment—into their business models, and there is momentum toward building Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems that support such dual goals.

Indigenous knowledge and practices are increasingly valued in fields like sustainable management, conservation, and corporate social responsibility. Indigenous approaches to land, water, and resource management offer valuable models for sustainability at the regional level. However, persistent concerns remain about cultural appropriation, exploitation, and the incursion of global markets on Indigenous lands and resources. Indigenous entrepreneurs often contend with globalization's negative impacts: extractive industries and supply chains that can erode local autonomy and harm sacred environments. Community artisans may struggle against cheap imitations of Indigenous crafts in global markets, and Indigenous farmers are sometimes displaced by multinational agribusiness.

This Special Issue will critically engage with the dilemmas facing Indigenous enterprises by examining how they navigate power asymmetries with external actors, protect their intellectual property and traditional knowledge, and assert forms of economic sovereignty. By doing so, it aims to advance Indigenous-centered entrepreneurship theory and frameworks that foreground ethics, equity, and cultural survival alongside conventional success metrics. The contributions seek to broaden entrepreneurship and regional development discourse by demonstrating how ventures rooted in Indigenous culture and community can drive sustainable, inclusive regional growth.

This Special Issue offers a platform for rethinking entrepreneurship through an Indigenous lens. Through a holistic view of Indigenous entrepreneurship, contributions will be both conceptually innovative and grounded in real-world relevance. The issue seeks to unite scholars, including Indigenous academics and allies, in advancing theories that better reflect entrepreneurial diversity and in spotlighting Indigenous experiences that have been too long on the margins of academic inquiry.

In line with the mission of Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, the special issue will draw connections between micro-level entrepreneurial practices and macro-level regional outcomes, between historical injustices and contemporary innovations, and between local Indigenous knowledge and global sustainability challenges. The collected papers will demonstrate how Indigenous enterprises worldwide are crafting pathways to sustainable success—pathways that often differ from mainstream business trajectories, but which hold lessons for regenerating economies and societies far beyond Indigenous communities themselves.

This issue aims to be more than a collection of articles—it aspires to be a cohesive scholarly statement that Indigenous entrepreneurship is a vibrant field at the forefront of redefining success in business and development. By bringing Indigenous voices and examples from across the globe into the pages of Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, this Special Issue hopes to enrich the journal's discourse and inspire future research that continues to bridge entrepreneurship with cultural equity, environmental care, and regional vitality.

Potential topics

• Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems: The role of community-driven support systems—mentors, networks, institutions in sustaining Indigenous enterprises and contributing to regional economic development.
• Indigenous enterprise in CSR/ESG: Contributions of Indigenous businesses to broader sustainability goals. How corporations engage with Indigenous entrepreneurs through partnerships, supply-chain inclusion, or social procurement, and the outcomes for Indigenous communities for sustainable outcomes.
• Leadership in Indigenous enterprises: Leadership styles and communal decision processes (consensus, elders' councils, etc.) that align business strategies with Indigenous cultural values.
• Market expansion and authenticity: Strategies for Indigenous businesses to expand into regional or global markets (e.g., exports, e-commerce, tourism) while protecting cultural authenticity and sovereignty.
• Branding and storytelling: Building brands around Indigenous cultural heritage and place-based identities. Effective marketing of Indigenous products (art, fashion, food, tourism) in ways that share culture without commodifying it.
• Cultural appropriation and IP rights: Safeguarding Indigenous arts, designs, and traditional knowledge in business. Navigating intellectual property laws and creating protocols for ethical use of cultural heritage.
• Indigenous worldviews in business: Integrating Indigenous concepts such as relationality, reciprocity, or the 'Seven Generations' principle into entrepreneurship and management frameworks, thereby broadening mainstream notions of strategy, innovation, and value.
• Entrepreneurship education and capacity-building: Community-based training, mentorship programs, and university partnerships (e.g., the MURRA Indigenous Business Masterclass in Australia) that build Indigenous business skills and leadership, and their impacts on communities.
• Enterprise as self-determination: The rise of Indigenous micro-entrepreneurs, small businesses, and cooperatives as pathways to self-determination. How does this trend affect local employment, community empowerment, and economic independence.
• Technology adoption: The use of digital platforms, renewable energy, social media, and other Industry 4.0 technologies by Indigenous entrepreneurs in ways that align with cultural values. Opportunities created (global market reach, new innovations) and tensions or challenges faced in the process.
• Challenges and resilience: Creative solutions to challenges in Indigenous business development, such as limited access to finance (e.g., innovative financing on communal lands), overcoming market barriers and discrimination, and building resilience against shocks like climate change or pandemics.
• Indigenous women entrepreneurs: Roles and contributions of Indigenous female entrepreneurs to economic development and community well-being, including their leadership approaches and the specific hurdles they face.
• Policy and place-based development: The influence of regional development policies or place-based initiatives (rural development funds, cultural tourism corridors, special economic zones on Indigenous territories) on Indigenous entrepreneurship. How Indigenous ventures engage with, adapt to, or resist these policy initiatives in their regions.
• Global comparative perspectives: Comparative studies of Indigenous entrepreneurship in under-researched regions (e.g., Mapuche or Quechua enterprises in Latin America, tribal communities in Asia, Indigenous businesses in Africa) to broaden the empirical base and glean insights beyond well-studied contexts (North America, Oceania, Northern Europe).
• Culture-based enterprise models: Indigenous enterprise models centered on cultural preservation and continuity (such as artisan cooperatives, community-run ecotourism, Indigenous media and digital platforms) that serve as both custodians of heritage and drivers of sustainable development.

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Publication year
• December 1, 2025: Launch of call and submissions open
• February 1, 2026: Virtual Paper Development Workshop
• May 1, 2026: Virtual Paper Development Workshop
• August 1, 2026: Virtual Paper Development Workshop
• October 30, 2026: Full paper submission deadline