Recently the concept of learning has become very fashionable among academics from different economic disciplines. Economic geographers and spatial planners joined this fashion by increasingly speaking about the "learning region". This paper makes clear that this learning region". This paper makes clear that this learning region concept has been launched from three angles; as spatial outcome of grand societal changes, as spatial concentration of entrepreneurial learning for innovation and as regional development concept. Despite the deficits and flaws such a young concept is faced with, such as vague definitions, the lack of empirical research and an insufficiently clear separation from existing concepts, the learning region concept might provide economic geography with more insight in agglomeration effects, stronger links with policy-making and more knowledge on path dependency and thus on unravelling the distinction between "good" and "bad" industrial agglomerations.