Agglomeration and innovation of knowledge intensive business services

Abstract

For some time now, the research focusing on Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) has been very active. Observing that knowledge as a production factor is only becoming more and more pronounced, this focus is well-grounded. It is therefore important to examine how these knowledge-hubs gain and propagate their knowledge. We hypothesize that KIBS (as many other sectors) benefit from intra-industry knowledge spillovers facilitated by geographical concentration. Our focus is the innovative capacity of KIBS, which we measure through trademarks registered by KIBS firms. While there may be several mechanisms facilitating knowledge spillovers, we can identify local intra-sectoral labor mobility as one. Accessibility measures are used to assess the geographical attenuation of the spillover effects. Results show that the distance decay of spillovers is fast. Only local concentrations of KIBS seem to be of importance. Over longer distances, we instead observe negative consequences for trademarking, indicating possible spatial competition effects.

Diversity, innovation and entrepreneurship: where are we and where should we go in future studies?

“…Jaffe et al (1993), for example, find newly developed knowledge, codified as patents, to be sticky, and to stimulate the development of new knowledge within the same region, specifically. This further implies that there is a distance decay in the diffusion of knowledge, since much critical knowledge tends to be tacit, i.e., embodied in people and thus at least in the short-run stuck in the region where it was developed (Audretsch and Feldman 1996;Kekezi and Klaesson 2019).…”

Geographical Concentration of Knowledge- and Technology-Intensive Industries and City Innovation in China

“…Two factors lead to the different impact of two industries on city innovation. On the one hand, KIBS needs proximity to suppliers and clients to provide professional services [42,48] and geographical proximity determines that the industrial chain of KIBS is spatially clustered. However, economic globalization leads to that every process in the industrial chain of TIM can be spatially separated.…”

“…In the process of economic transition, the role of KIBS in the regional innovation system (RIS) has begun to be recognized widely [8,10,[42][43][44]. KIBS can not only produce knowledge and skills in its own industry but also indirectly stimulate knowledge spills of other industries by providing knowledge-based services or products to manufacturing enterprises [10,45].…”

“…Therefore, MAR externalities also apply to KIBS. By choosing accessibility as a measure of geographical proximity to a mass of KIBS firms, Kekezi and Klaesson [42] observed that geographical proximity of KIBS enterprises significantly stimulates KIBS innovation, whereas the diversity of enterprise agglomeration is negatively correlated with KIBS innovation, which strongly supported MAR externalities in KIBS agglomeration. Thus, based on the theory of MAR externalities, this paper will compare the diverse impacts of KIBS and TIM specialization (KIB and TIML) on city innovation Knowledge production function considers regional innovation as a result of R and D expenditure (RDG) and investment in human capital (HUM) [30,35,37,53,54].…”

“…Therefore, only the knowledge spillover of KIBS is discussed in our paper. Most studies follow the detailed definition of KIBS proposed by Miles et al [59]: (1) high-skilled labour market pooling, (2) providing knowledge-based intermediate inputs with organisations, (3) private and public sectors as the clients [42]. Decree No.…”