Does 'Clustering' really help firms'innovative activities?

Catherine Beaudry and Stefano Breschi ()

No 111, KITeS Working Papers from KITeS, Centre for Knowledge, Internationalization and Technology Studies, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy

Abstract: This paper examines whether location in strong industrial clusters translates into a higher probability of innovating. A firm-level analysis of the UK and Italy is performed. Innovative activities of firms (European patent data for 1988-98) are related to regional employment, other cluster-specific and firm-specific variables. Clustering per se does not explain all of a firm's inno-vative performance. While location in a cluster densely populated by innovative firms positively af-fects the likelihood of innovating, strong disadvantages arise from the presence of non-innova-tive firms, both in own and other sectors industries. Firms' innovative persistence and the regional knowledge stock are also important.

Keywords: Clusters; Innovation; Knowledge; Spillovers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L10 O30 O40 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2000-02, Revised 2000-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.unibocconi.it/pub/RePEc/cri/papers/wp111.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.unibocconi.it: No such host is known.

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:cri:cespri:wp111

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
E G E A - via R. Sarfatti, 25 - 20136 Milano -Italy

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KITeS Working Papers from KITeS, Centre for Knowledge, Internationalization and Technology Studies, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy via Sarfatti, 25 - 20136 Milano - Italy.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Valerio Sterzi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).