EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Understanding and learning from an evolving geography of innovation

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Callum Wilkie

Chapter 3 in Handbook on the Geographies of Innovation, 2016, pp 63-87 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: According to prevailing theories of agglomeration, location and innovation, innovative capacity and innovative activity are predisposed to concentrating in the ‘economic cores’ of the world. This would ultimately result in the emergence of a geography of innovation characterized by spatial imbalances and a distinct ‘urban’ or ‘city bias’. Some empirical evidence from both the developed and developing world would seem to validate this expectation – many core cities host a disproportionately large amount of innovative activity. There is also, however, growing empirical evidence indicating that spatial patterns of innovation are evolving and that, as a consequence, a more nuanced view of the geography of innovation would be necessary. The aim of the chapter is to explore the subtly evolving geography of innovation from both a theoretical perspective as well as an empirical one. More specifically, the chapter reviews the various theories that predict the concentration of innovation in large, core cities by exploring, using patent data, the spatial patterns of innovation in five developed and emerging countries. The chapter provides first order insights into the way in which the global geography of innovation is changing, and offers an interpretation and explanation for this evolving geography of innovation that feeds directly into a discussion of the policy implications associated with the gradual spatial dispersion of knowledge-intensive, innovative activity.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Environment; Geography; Innovations and Technology; Urban and Regional Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781784710767.00011.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:16055_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:16055_3