Firms in Scottish High Technology Clusters: software, life sciences, microelectronics, optoelectronics and digital media – preliminary evidence and analysis on firm size, growth and optimality

Gavin Reid and Vandana Ujjual

No 804, CRIEFF Discussion Papers from Centre for Research into Industry, Enterprise, Finance and the Firm

Abstract: This paper reports on: (a) new primary source evidence on; and (b) statistical and econometric analysis of high technology clusters in Scotland. It focuses on the following sectors: software, life sciences, microelectronics, optoelectronics, and digital media. Evidence on a postal and e-mailed questionnaire is presented and discussed under the headings of: performance, resources, collaboration & cooperation, embeddedness, and innovation. The sampled firms are characterised as being small (viz. micro-firms and SMEs), knowledge intensive (largely graduate staff), research intensive (mean spend on R&D GBP 842k), and internationalised (mainly selling to markets beyond Europe). Preliminary statistical evidence is presented on Gibrat’s Law (independence of growth and size) and the Schumpeterian Hypothesis (scale economies in R&D). Estimates suggest a short-run equilibrium size of just 100 employees, but a long-run equilibrium size of 1000 employees. Further, to achieve the Schumpeterian effect (of marked scale economies in R&D), estimates suggest that firms have to grow to very much larger sizes of beyond 3,000 employees. We argue that the principal way of achieving the latter scale may need to be by takeovers and mergers, rather than by internally driven growth

Keywords: High technology; Scottish firms; Gibrat’s Law; the Schumpeterian Hypothesis. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 O31 O34 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm, nep-mic and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_crieff/papers/dp0804.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_crieff/papers/dp0804.pdf [302 Found]--> https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_crieff/papers/dp0804.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Firms in Scottish High Technology Clusters: software, life sciences, microelectronics, optoelectronics and digital media preliminary evidence and analysis on firm size, growth and optimality (2008)
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:san:crieff:0804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRIEFF Discussion Papers from Centre for Research into Industry, Enterprise, Finance and the Firm Department of Economics, Castlecliffe, The Scores, St Andrews, KY16 9AZ. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Department of Economics, The University of St Andrews Business School ().