The Emergence of Knowledge Production in New Places

Christopher Esposito

No 2046, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: This article studies how new locations emerge as advantageous places for the creation of ideas. Analysis of a novel patent-based dataset that traces the flow of knowledge between inventions and across time reveals that inventors initiate knowledge production in new places through a three-stage process. In the first stage, about 50 years before knowledge production in a region reaches an appreciable volume, local inventors begin to experiment with a few promising ideas developed in other places. In the second stage, inventors use the promising ideas developed elsewhere to create a large number of highly impactful inventions locally. In the third stage, inventors source high-impact ideas from their local environs and produce an even larger number of inventions, albeit of lower quality. Overall knowledge production in regions peaks in this third stage, but novelty and the potential for future knowledge growth decline.

Keywords: Regional development; innovation; knowledge transmission; agglomeration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09, Revised 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2046.pdf Version September 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:2046

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 (t.broekel@uu.nl this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).