There has been a veritable avalanche of material and studies recently published on the question of globalization - the emerging system of inter-national economic activity and governance that threatens the integrity of twentieth-century national boundaries while providing new action spaces for behaviour and organisation. As an issue, it joins together a whole series of fields of interest including anthropology, economics, geography, management studies, political science, sociology and much more. The key arguments and debates about globalization have raised searching questions about the significance of national and regional borders for the competitive strategies of individuals, firms and industries. Global Competitiveness and Innovation seeks to address these issues by exploring four key topics: the status of economic agents in the emerging global economy; the limits of path dependence and the scope of agent action; the relationship between agents' decision-making and their environments; and agents' learning capacities in a world of information and knowledge creation.