Abstract
This chapter analyses the ways in which financialization has transformed the territorial and organizational dynamics of innovation in global value chains, by adopting a historical perspective and focusing on Grenoble, the main French cluster in microelectronics R&D. The analysis draws on the geography of domination and neo-Gramscian approaches to (re)problematize spatial and institutional change as a political struggle in global value chains. On the basis of thirty-five interviews conducted between 2007 and 2010, archival information and secondary data, the authors identify three distinct periods in the development of the Grenoble cluster in which the specific geographical boundaries, forms of innovation, and relationship to the local territory in which its activities were embedded differed.