Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Nuclear Science and Engineering, 2008.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-179).The North Sea oil province, one of the world's major centers of petroleum and natural gas production, has been in play for four decades. Production rates have approached their peaks in recent years and are expected to decline continuously in the future. The economies of certain cities and regions bordering on the North Sea have become heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry. How these local economies will sustain themselves in the future as resource depletion continues is a critical question. To gain insight into this question, we selected a matched pair of city-regions, each of which is an important center of the oil and gas industry in the North Sea province: Aberdeen in Scotland and Stavanger in Norway. By studying the similarities and differences between the local innovation systems in the two regions, we can gain a general understanding of how local economies respond to changes in their environment. U.S. patenting data are used as a tool to describe the behavior and performance of the two local innovation systems. The patent data provide a means of systematically and consistently estimating knowledge flows. The use of U.S. patent and patent citation data provides evidence, references, and guidelines to the project from a quantitative perspective. Several indicators were developed to describe these knowledge flows, along with a model providing further insight into how knowledge was acquired and introduced into the two local innovation systems, how and to what extent local innovation capabilities were developed, and how knowledge created locally has spread elsewhere.(cont.) Both Stavanger and Aberdeen have worked hard to strengthen their local innovation capabilities by learning from the world's most advanced firms, especially those from the U.S.,and by building capabilities of their own. At the same time, attracted by the extensive reserves of oil and gas, multinational firms, many from the U.S., moved into the North Sea region. The involvement of multinational firms helped reinforce local innovation capabilities. However, because of the different policy approaches pursued in the two regions, U.S. firms, the international leaders in oil and gas technology, have played more important roles in Aberdeen than in Stavanger. In the Stavanger area, local innovation activities have been led by national oil companies rather than by foreign firms.by Wei Gao.Ph.D.