Who knows the future? Towards an expectation-oriented regional industrial evolution

Evolutionary economic geography has a strong explanatory power for how regional industries emerge and is therefore particularly important in today’s context of global industrial competition. In recent years, economic geographers have proposed that the role of expectations in industrial evolution should be given as much weight as historical routines. Following this vein, we formulate a conceptual framework and propose that historical experience and expectations jointly contribute to the formation of regional conventions and industrial legitimation. We also attempt to figure out the roles of regional endowments, actor collaboration and market construction in conditioning an expectation-oriented industrial evolution. Our work contributes to the perspective transformation of evolutionary economic geography as well as provides future research directions.