CONCEPT
Region-State
Ohmae's 1995 concept for the sub-national or cross-border economic zone that functions as the relevant unit of global competition — an economic geography organized around integration into global markets rather than political borders.
The region-state is defined by its functional integration into global economic flows rather than by political boundaries. Ohmae identified region-states as the relevant competitive units of the late twentieth century: economic zones such as the Pearl River Delta, northern Italy's industrial districts, Silicon Valley, and the Kansai region around Osaka. Each was defined by its specialized human capital, institutional infrastructure, and integration into global supply chains — characteristics that made it a coherent economic unit regardless of whether the political borders surrounding it contained it or cut across it. The AI moment extends the relevance of the region-state framework: when implementation capability is globally democratized, the competitive differentiator is the quality of human capital concentrated in specific cities and institutions, which is region-state-level rather than national-level.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The region-state framework emerged from Ohmae's observation that economic outcomes within nations varied enormously. The Pearl River Delta outperformed the rest of China. Northern Italy outperformed southern Italy. Silicon