The literature on regional innovation systems (RIS) highlights that the localized social and institutional contexts of knowledge production matter for economic success. For less‐advantaged regions, this raises a practical methodological challenge: how to construct platforms for regional innovation from the ground up? This paper discusses how a university working in a geographically and economically peripheral Australian region, the Cradle Coast region of Tasmania, has addressed this challenge, using insights from regional development platform method (RDPM). This work has demonstrated the difficulties of applying RDPM in a context where regional development actors lack strong structural, relational and cognitive ties. An approach called knowledge partnering has been used to overcome ‘connectivity deficits’ and bring regional actors together around issues of common concern. The local university has played a key role in this process. For policy‐makers, this process illustrates how universities can work with regions to catalyse regional development outcomes.

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With this team looking far stronger than any which Labor has been able to muster since it lost office in 1993, arrayed against an Olsen Government embarking on the delicate task of governing without a parliamentary majority, South Australian politics looks to be entering a new and very interesting phase.

Prior to election day, Tasmania looked as if it was to be the State most likely to return to the status quo in terms of party support in the House of Representatives-five Labor members in five electorates-and a potential reverse of the major-party returns on the 2004 Senate result, with Labor this time edging ahead with three seats, Liberal two and the Greens one. It had been a dull and lifeless campaign with no reckless takeovers of regional hospitals (2007) In contrast with those elections, in 2010, the volatile issue of forestry management lay dormant in the run-up to the vote. No political party, including the Greens, was prepared to risk the wedge effect of the forestry/pulp mill issue.Tasmanians remained concerned about access to preventative and acute-care health delivery in remote rural and regional electorates-particularly Braddon in the north-west of the State, where a series of promises over cancer treatment facilities stretched the imaginations of the candidates and the bottom line of spending commitments.Employment losses following industry closures in the vegetable-processing sector and paper mills in Burnie and Wesley Vale, east of Devonport, also heightened concerns in Braddon while uncertainty in the forestry industry was creating disquiet in Bass and Braddon. The impact of the proposed Mining Super Profits Tax on west-coast mining communities (which reverted to Braddon from Lyons in the 2009 redistribution) was a much discussed issue in early campaigning.Labor made much of the National Broadband Network (NBN) roll-out in Tasmania, with the State the first cab off the rank for this ambitious project, and when the Coalition policy differed significantly in terms of cost and technology there was renewed focus on the impact these contrasting approaches might have in the electorates of Bass (Scottsdale), Lyons (Midway Point) and Braddon (Smithton), where fibre-optic connections had been operating during the election campaign.