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Over the past two decades there has been an international surge of analytical and policy interest in the`knowledge-based economy' in which firms are engaged in the production and adoption of new technologies, and the innovation and reinnovation of industrial products and processes. Innovation by firms, across the range of technologies from traditional to advanced, is conceived as part of a learning process, which may be incremental or reliant on new developments. Simultaneously, there has been a renewed interest in the geographical clustering of industrial firms in core regions and in major cities within them. This means there has been significant refocusing of research on how agglomeration economies and innovation sustain nodes of industrial activity. Industrial clusters, regional innovation systems, and industrial districts are the most common regional industrial models in use and though they tend to have different applications their developers have focused on bonds between firms and with other institutions within regions. The concept of globalization, however, recognizes the ease with which goods, capital, and ideas move at the international and interregional levels and there is a need to integrate this reality into models of industrial clustering by considering the network choices of industrial firms.In this paper I identify recent literature that breaks with conventional models of regional industrial systems, especially industrial clusters, in order to provide a clearer recognition of the importance of interregional (including international) inputs of industrial knowledge, product market connections, and other interorganizational relationships. Then I develop a case study of the knowledge networking of firms in the electronics cluster of the Toronto metropolitan region. I evaluate the significance of interregional compared with intraregional bonds and whether they vary with the organization and ownership of firms, company scale, and the different business environments in which firms exchange knowledge. The conclusion of the paper includes a brief consideration of the policy implications of the research results.

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