The role of government in facilitating the innovative capacity of industry: The case of the Tasmanian light shipbuilding industry.

In order to understand the positive role that regional governments can play in facilitating the innovative capacity of its industries, this paper analyses the 25-year history of the Tasmanian government's interaction with the Tasmanian Light Shipbuilding Industry. The research findings indicate that unlike governments of major economies, regional governments play a central and necessarily intrusive role in the facilitation of an industry's innovative capacity, and that this role is necessarily changeable over its life cycle. This paper provides a discussion of the policy implications, and presents a reconceptualisation of Porter's Diamond Factor Model for policy makers in regional economic settings.