Globalization fundamentally changed how the core processes of evolutionary economic geography – the introduction of novelty, retention and selection in regional economies – work. In fact, one could argue that decreased time geography constraints – lower capability, coupling and authority constraints – together with how regional actors react to and make use of them, are globalization. Therefore, economic change, and the way in which it is a spatial phenomenon, looks very different today than it did 100, 50 or even 30 years ago.

In essence and on average, this globalization has been a good thing. Increased portability of resource uses creates problems for some regions, where the closing down of pathways has led to lock- in and organizational routines have not been able to adapt, but it creates opportunities for others that skilfully create, use and curate their regional resources. It is the global division of labour and the thousands of resource specializations around the world that have allowed the world economy to produce such endless economic variety in our time.

So far, and for many reasons, evolutionary economic geographers have been overwhelmingly concerned with what goes on among actors and technologies within regions, and how regional processes affect the introduction of novelty, retention and selection. But in a globalized economy, one with decreasing time geography constraints, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand economic change in regions without explicitly taking into account what goes on between regions. How can you explain economic change in Gothenburg or Borås, or even relevant fractions of it, without taking globalization into account as well? It is not that evolutionary economic geographers never had such thoughts, but the traditional evolutionary view was more focused on explaining how regions were still important in a globalized world, rather than investigating how regional and global aspects meet to explain evolutionary economic change. In this book, time geography has provided some tools to make the global and the regional meet in a productionist evolutionary perspective on regional economic change.

In a globalized economy, a region does not need to possess all the regional resources and locally draw the uses needed to achieve a productive capability. This insight is not new, but by combining time geography with the evolutionary view on regional economies, we have tried to make it obvious how this actually happens and how it links to regional economic change. But it also links directly to regional specialization.