Quebec's Coastal Maritime Industrial Cluster: (Not) Innovative and (Locally) Embedded‪?‬

Today, it is widely accepted that innovation in firms is embedded within collaborative networks and the regional economy (Asheim and Gertler, 2005; Asheim and Coenen, 2005; Cooke et al., 2004; Cumbers et al., 2003; Doloreux, 2004a; Freel, 2003; Todtling and Kaufmann, 2001; Wolfe and Gertler, 2004). These authors, among others, generally concede that innovation can be improved when firms interact with private and public organizations, and with various kinds of support organizations in their region. In this sense, the institutional characteristics, the knowledge infrastructures, and knowledgetransfer systems, as well as the individual strategy and performance of firms, represent significant basic conditions defining regional competitiveness. There is also a resurgence of interest in understanding spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in various sorts of interactive learning processes experienced by diverse industries and regions (Gordon and McCann, 2005; Malmberg and Maskell, 1997; Porter, 1998). The prevailing interest asserts that regional development ensues as competitiveness evolves in places where localized capabilities exist (Cooke, 2001). Furthermore, Porter (1998) stresses that the enduring sources of competitive advantage in a global economy are often extremely local, arising from a concentration of highly specialized skills and knowledge, institutions, related businesses, and "demanding" customers in a particular region, where, in most cases, innovation is less the product of individual firms than of the assembled resources, knowledge, and other inputs and capabilities that are localized in specific places (Maskell and Malmberg, 1999).