Creative and science-oriented employees and firm-level innovation

Stephan Brunow, Antonia Birkeneder and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

No 1808, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: This paper examines the link between innovation and the endowments of creative and science-oriented STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics ? workers at the level of the firm and at the city-/regional-level in Germany. It also looks into whether the presence of these two groups of workers has greater benefits for larger cities than smaller locations, thus justifying policies to attract these workers in order to make German cities 'smarter'. The empirical analysis is based on a probit estimation, covering 115,000 firm-level observations between 1998 and 2015. The results highlight that firms that employ creative and STEM workers are more innovative than those that do not. However, the positive connection of creative workers to innovation is limited to the boundaries of the firm, whereas that of STEM workers is as associated to the generation of considerable innovation spillovers. Hence, attracting STEM workers is more likely to end up making German cities smarter than focusing exclusively on creative workers.

Keywords: Innovation; Creative workers; STEM workers; Smart Cities; Spillover; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 J21 J24 J82 R12 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02, Revised 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-lma, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1808.pdf Version February 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Creative and science-oriented employees and firm-level innovation (2018)
Working Paper: Creative and science-oriented employees and firm-level innovation (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:1808

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).