Evolutionary economic geography integrates numerous strands of heterodox spatial fields. Some parts of even ‘new neoclassical’theory, such as increasing returns, aspects of endogeneity in growth processes, and notions of abiding spatial disequilibrium as the resultant of increasing returns to spatial scale (Krugman, 1995), provide interesting insights into why some regions are rich and others poor, to echo Malthus’s famous question of Ricardo (Landes, 1998). But this is all, for there are few other distinctive contributions to be made from that quarter. One sub-field of regional science that is more squarely compatible with an evolutionary approach is that dealing with regional innovation systems (Braczyk et al., 1998). It is avowedly neo-Schumpeterian, translating that author’s resolutely aspatial economist’s mode of analysis and bringing further life to it. Indeed, elsewhere it has been argued that one reason why it continually attracts fascination is that regional innovation systems analysis gave a boost to more general innovation systems thinking. This, according to Carlsson (2007), is the dominant innovation studies field since refereed articles began appearing in the mid-1990s (Cooke, 1992). The reason for this is explored in section 1 of the chapter, arguing that the conceptual perspective of industrial economics, often referred to as ‘industrial dynamics’ in the innovation studies literature, is vertical–down the sector, as it were, from the vertically integrated large firm to its suppliers and support organisations. In the old days of the ‘Industrial Age’when multinationals evolved as vertically integrated behemoths, pursuing industrial organisational processes that could be captured in simple ‘S’shaped curves by the likes of Vernon (1966), this fitted a linear theory of innovation. But, as is well known, that model began breaking down not long after it was conceptualised, and large firms began to outsource even essential requirements, chiefly to respond to Japanese ‘lean production’, although the formulation of that academically came some twentyplus years after Vernon (1966) in the ‘lean production’bible of Jones et al.(1990). The geographical imagination is more horizontal, finding little difficulty even seeing much of what hitherto passed for vertical integration as far from complete. One only had to have spent time in 1950s to 1960s Birmingham or Coventry, as did one of this chapter’s authors, rurally raised, on frequent visits to relatives who had migrated from the declining Welsh coalfields to seek a better life, to experience the shock of seeing numerous (usually black-painted) brand-new truck chassis with unenclosed engine and wheels, and hung-on temporary licence plates, being driven through the city-centre to one of many distant city coach-building specialists to be finished, to experience ‘agglomeration’at first-hand (Boschma and Wenting, 2007).