River deep, mountain high: Of long-run knowledge trajectories within and between innovation clusters

Onder Nomaler () and Bart Verspagen
Additional contact information
Onder Nomaler: UNU-MERIT, and Eindhoven University of Technology

No 2016-048, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: We bring together the topics of geographical clusters and technological trajectories, and shift the focus of the analysis of regional innovation to main technological trends rather than firms. We define a number of inventive clusters in the US space and show that long chains of citations mostly take place between these clusters. This is reminiscent of the idea of global pipelines of knowledge transfer that is found in the geographical literature. The deep citations are used to identify technological trajectories, which are the main directions along which incremental technological progress accumulates into larger changes. While the origin and destination of these trajectories are concentrated in space, the intermediate nodes travel long distances and cover many locations across the globe. We conclude by calling for more theoretical and empirical attention to the "deep rivers" that connect the "high mountains" of local knowledge production.

Keywords: patent citations; regional concentration of inventive activities; technological trajectories; regional clusters; technological trends (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O33 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-sbm, nep-sog, 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)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/wppdf/2016/wp2016-048.pdf (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:unm:unumer:2016048

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ad Notten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).