The Journal of Regional Research – Investigaciones Regionales (http://investigacionesregionales.org/en) announces a call for papers for a Special Issue devoted to uncover spatial dimensions and industry dynamics on the topic of Territorial Servitization.

Territorial servitization is the outcome of the symbiotic relation between knowledge-intensive service (KIBS) sectors and manufacturing firms which, in turn, generates superior territorial resilience, manufacturing renaissance and competitiveness, as well as regional development. The special issue is titled “Territorial Servitization: Industry interconnectedness and the competitiveness of manufacturing in knowledge-based economies”, and expects to collect research articles and letters devoted to topics such as

• Conceptualization and provision of evidence on new approaches to cluster and industrial district policies formed by multi-sector firms, including manufacturing and knowledge-intensive industries.
• Economic assessment of the impact of product-service implementation on firm or territorial performance in servitized contexts.
• Analysis of how and to what extent local hybrid value chains influence manufacturing renaissance in European countries as well as territorial competitiveness.
• What are the antecedents, moderators/mediators, and outcomes of KIBS-manufacturing collaborations and performance?
• Which are the contractual arrangements that underpin the linkages between knowledge intensive services and manufacturers: outsourcing, partnerships, strategic alliances, joint ventures, mergers & acquisitions?
• Do KIBS firms offer opportunities for local SMEs to outsource service provision? And for multinationals to reshoring their production to the home country? Which is the relevance of geographical distance when it comes to transferring knowledge from service to product firms?

The servitization of regions offers an opportunity for local manufacturing economies to resume growth and sustain long-term competitiveness. As such, the renaissance of manufacturing through territorial servitization not only enables the upgrading of existing manufacturing competences but also offers an opportunity to develop and anchor new technological capabilities across municipalities regions.

From a recently published special issue in Regional Studies we know that institutions and geographic proximity between product and service businesses increase the positive impact of entrepreneurial activity on regional economic performance. The key does not come from economic territorial specialization or from the pure quantitative agglomeration of firms in a particular region, but rather from the inter-connections and complementarities that link these together. From this we can extrapolate that territorial servitization, as a meso-level process linking services and industry, enhances the local impact of manufacturing activity on regional development facilitating local knowledge diffusion.

Within the servitization frame, internal scale economies are substituted by external economies related to the existence of skilled workers, specialized suppliers, and an informal system of knowledge diffusion. This development trajectory based on territorial servitization—which shares a stock of work-related and knowledge-intensive services in local settings with locally interweaving patterns of production and marketing—has the potential to spread and contribute to create a diversified, but related, industrial fabric.

As such, the overall aim of this special issue is to bring together evidence and perspectives from different lines of study that build upon and support the foundations for the theoretical development of the Territorial Servitization concept. The proposed special issue will help corral together many of these positions within one single topic, helping readers to focus on the essence of the concept and its underpinnings, creating common standards for further research as well as giving greater credibility and exposure to Territorial Servitization.

Editors of the Special Issue: this Special Issue is edited by Esteban Lafuente (esteban.lafuente@upc.edu), Yancy Vaillant (y.vaillant@tbs-education.org) and Ferran Vendrell-Herrero (f.vendrell-herrero@bham.ac.uk). Authors with questions about the suitability of proposed topics for this special issue are encouraged to contact the guest editors. A special session (S10) on the topic will be organized in ERSA 2019 to be held in Lyon, https://ersa.eventsair.com/59th-ersa-congress-lyon-27-30-august-2019/call-for-abstracts-and-papers. Participation to the event is an opportunity to informally discuss the progress of the research with guest editors, but presentation at the special session does not guarantee acceptance of the paper for publication and is not a precondition for acceptance into the Special Issue.

The Journal of Regional Research – Investigaciones Regionales is the flagship journal of the Spanish Regional Science Association (https://investigacionesregionales.org/en/). While being specialized in regional issues, this journal is multidisciplinary and strongly devoted to European and Latin American topics. It is an academic journal, where all papers are subject to a double and blind review process. The journal is full Open Access, free for authors and readers. It is indexed in Clarivate’s Analytics Emerging Sources Citation Index and in Scopus, where it is listed in the first quartile of Economics according to the 2017 CiteScore rank.

Deadlines and publication schedule

• September 30th, 2019: Deadline for full papers submission
• Expected publication: Spring-Autumn 2020

Submission Instructions

• All works submitted must be analytic and rigorous and will be subject to the normal blind refereeing process undertaken by the journal.
• All submitted works must not be under review by any other journal
• Letters should be about 3,000 words. Full articles are should have between 8,000 and 10,000 words.
• Submission guidelines are reported at https://investigacionesregionales.org/en/envio-de-articulos/submission-of-papers-and-others-contributions/
• The article will be sent through the portal Open Journal System (OJS) of the Spanish Repository of Science and Technology (RECYT): https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/IR/login.