Knowledge-Intensive Business Services as Knowledge Intermediaries in Industrial Regions: A Comparison of the Hsinchu and Tainan Metropolitan Areas

Hung-Nien Hsieh, Chi-Mei Chen, Jun-Yao Wang and Tai-Shan Hu

European Planning Studies, 2015, vol. 23, issue 11, 2253-2274

Abstract: The literature repeatedly stresses the role of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) as a provider of knowledge and information to other businesses and organizations. KIBS simultaneously promotes, mediates and enables client innovation. This investigation mainly seeks to link KIBS to the analytical structure of concepts, including regional innovation systems, knowledge exchanges and innovation patterns. This investigation interprets the role of KIBS as that of a knowledge intermediary that mediates and transmits knowledge among actors. This study also clarifies the mechanism of knowledge exchanges in different geographic innovation systems. The analytical results obtained by this investigation are applied to analyse the intermediary functions of KIBS in various metropolitan areas in southern and northern Taiwan. This investigation demonstrates variations in how KIBS act as knowledge intermediaries, and that these variations depend mostly on industrial cluster patterns, the dominant innovation patterns at their locations and the birth of sustainable KIBS. KIBS in large/core metropolitan regions, thus, are initially based on science, technology and innovation industrial activities, and further closely resemble doing, using and interaction industrial activities. Consequently, more informal learning processes, such as local buzz and discussion/competition relations, tend to develop in such regions.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09654313.2014.958133 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:eurpls:v:23:y:2015:i:11:p:2253-2274

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEPS20

DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2014.958133

Access Statistics for this article

European Planning Studies is currently edited by Philip Cooke and Louis Albrechts

More articles in European Planning Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().