The newly published Research Handbook on Regions and Transformative Innovation Policy explores how regions across the world are rethinking and employing innovation to tackle contemporary challenges.
While TIP has generated important insights into how innovation can contribute to system transformation, regions have largely remained absent from the debate. The handbook addresses that gap for the first time at a global scale, bringing together 22 chapters that explore regions as critical arenas for transformative innovation policy in a wide range of contexts, including Latin America.
The territorial blind spot: why regions matter
The Handbook highlights several reasons why regions should play a more prominent role in transformative innovation debates:
- Grand challenges are global but lived locally. For example, decarbonisation in Czech peripheral regions is different from Catalonia and different again from Medellín.
- TIP literature emerged primarily from sectoral transition studies, with regions often treated as delivery vehicles rather than sites of transformation.
- The same policy instrument that works in a high-capacity metropolitan region can fail or even backfire in lagging regions.
- Regional policy has been dominated by Smart Specialisation (S3): place-based, but primarily focused on competitiveness.
- Regions are the site where economic, social and environmental sustainability intersect most directly — and where experimentation is often most feasible.
Lessons from Latin America
Among the contributions is Chapter 18, Latin America and Transformative Innovation Policy, authored by TIPC’s Latin American and Caribbean Hub (HUBLAyCTIP) Lead Matias Ramirez.
The chapter examines how Latin America has served as a test bed for transformative innovation policies over the past decade. Drawing on experiences at national, regional and local levels, it explores how science, technology and innovation (STI) policies and investments have been directed towards projects with transformative ambitions and outcomes.
To illustrate these developments, the chapter presents four case studies of policies and practices aimed at transformative change: the publication of Colombia’s Green Book in 2018, Bogotá’s TransMilenio public transport system, Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting scheme, and the social movement to protect Bogotá’s wetlands. Together, these cases demonstrate different pathways through which transformative innovation can emerge through policy, governance, infrastructure development and civic mobilisation.
Reflecting on the lessons emerging from these experiences, Ramirez notes:
“These cases highlight the determined efforts at regional levels to change the narrative and practices of regional policy, which in many cases were successful, but also the still largely fragmented and ill-coordinated nature of many initiatives and the opposition of incumbents to processes of democratisation. Whilst the cases also shed light on the uneven and fragmented nature of systems and how these factors influence processes of transformation in Latin America, they underline the potential for transformational change in the cities of the Global South in particular.”
Medellín: a leading example of transformative innovation in practice
A broader finding emerging across the Handbook’s 22 chapters is the importance of urban contexts as spaces for transformative experimentation.
The case of Medellín, outlined in Chapter 19 authored by Jorge Robledo Velásquez, Walter Lugo Ruiz Castañeda, and María Luisa Villalba Morales, stands out as one of the examples that comes closest to embodying the principles of Transformative Innovation Policy in practice. Characterised by inclusive participation, experimentation and contestation, the city’s experience demonstrates both the potential and fragility of transformative change. While Medellín offers one of the richest examples of TIP in action, the continuity of these achievements remains dependent on institutional support.