Page - (000207) - in Knowledge and Networks

201 to the fore. Needless to say, this gathering increased regional discussion about what potential reconfigurations of established value-chain architectures could lead to. The issue of electromobility became even more important almost as a “historical accident” (David, 1985, p. 332) when the federal government announced its second economic stimulus package to mitigate the economic downturn accompanying the global financial crisis. In early 2009 an additional €500 million for R&D, market preparation, and demonstration were provided. Eight electromobility pilot regions, including the metropolitan regions of Berlin and Stuttgart, were selected in the first half of 2009. More than one fifth of the overall budget was earmarked for these regional initiatives. When the first period of political agenda-setting ended in August 2009, only a few months before federal elections, the German government adopted the National Electromobility Development Plan. Besides focusing on the intensified R&D of bat- tery systems, this incentivized roadmap also drew considerable attention to the regional scale. Among other things, the necessity of an alternative battery-charging infrastructure had to be tested, and the viability of electric vehicles had to be dem- onstrated in regional projects. In this respect the document comprised a mélange of climate and economic goals pushed forward by political actors, particularly high- lighting the market-oriented objective of putting one million electric vehicles on Germany’s roads by 2020 (German Federal Government, 2009). Having gained momentum at the national level, the issue of electromobility spread to the Stuttgart and Berlin regions at the end of 2008—the first time at that level. However, new regional industries to address it did not arise out of nowhere; they branched out from already existing industries (Boschma & Frenken, 2011a). The preexisting local economic and technological environments may thus properly be regarded as either constraining or enabling the emergence (Martin, 2010, p. 20). In short, the two regions in our embedded comparative case study fundamentally differed in the inherited conditions, knowledge bases, and competencies that informed these early activities. In the Stuttgart region an enabling precondition was evident in efforts to increase the interorganizational coordination of existing activities within the institutional- ized automotive cluster in order to face future challenges in the industry. The main thrust of these early networking activities as of 2007 was to safeguard the existing value chain of powertrain technologies based on the internal combustion engine, so the new issue of electromobility was not explicitly addressed. The first reference to this new technological alternative came 1 year later, in late 2008. Key actors from the automotive industry and the energy and ICT sectors took up the then-new sub- ject of electromobility in their joint application to two competitive national funding programs—the prestigious Leading-Edge Cluster Competition and the Electromobility Pilot Regions—announced as part of the German federal govern- ment’s second economic stimulus package. Above all, these national programs acted as a means of anchoring the issue of electromobility in the existing structure of industry for the first time. In summer 2009 the Stuttgart region was selected as a pilot region. However, the proposal for the R&D-focused Leading-Edge Cluster Competition failed. This outcome greatly disconcerted the region’s industrial actors. 10 Platforming for Path-Breaking