The origin of this Special Issue of European Planning Studies lies in an RSA conference on "Regional Growth Agendas" at Aalborg University, 28-31 May 2005. We were invited to be managers of the "Enabling Knowledge Strategies" conference track. We received sufficient excellent papers on the theme we constructed to more than fill a book, co-edited by us and published in 2007 as Creative Regions: Technology, Culture & Knowledge Entrepreneurship (Routledge). As many readers will know, book publishers constrain authors to set word lengths related to pricing policy and what they consider the market will bear. This caused an interesting dilemma, since our publisher was delighted to have the opportunity to publish the book we proposed, provided we reduced it by seven chapters! Should we "cull" the weakest? This was impossible because all were strong, interesting contributions. Or should we operate a triage strategy and take out a whole section? We decided on a third strategy of triage-plus, meaning we took out the section of the book on investment, mostly focusing on venture capital, the first three papers that follow, then we selected four more papers that would balance up this Special Issue in ways reflective of the idea underlying our conference track.
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