Barriers of regional development: Application of evolutionary biology concepts

Abstract

The paper tries to explore the socio-economic barriers of new developmental trajectories of regional specialization, innovations or information flows. It is presumed that structures and mechanisms developed originally to support regional specialization or innovations dispersion during the path dependence process operate in a side-effect as socio-economic barriers, in analogy to the evolutionary process of speciation and especially to the concept of reproductive isolation mechanisms. The biological concept of reproductive isolation mechanisms and its way of classification seem to provide some inspiring aspects for identification of socio-economic barriers, their classification and creation of a theoretical framework that is applied to some case studies linked with path dependence process.