How smart is specialisation? An analysis of specialisation patterns in knowledge production

Abstract

To understand how specialisation patterns of cities differ among scientific fields, we study patterns of knowledge production in Astrophysics, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and Organic Chemistry between 1996 and 2012. Using keywords from journal publications, we find systematic differences across scientific fields, but remarkable similarities across cities within each field. Biotechnology shows a turbulent pattern with comparative advantages that are short lasting, and with few related topics are available for research locations. Astrophysics and-in later years Nanotechnology-show a pattern of stable rankings, comparative advantages that last longer, and many related topics potentially available for research locations. Organic Chemistry has an intermediate position. Fields of knowledge production thus have fundamentally different characteristics that require different smart specialisation strategies taking into account the differences in accumulation and relatedness.

Smart specialization policy in the European Union: relatedness, knowledge complexity and regional diversification

“…4 While Figure 1 displays the relatedness between technology pairings for the EU as a whole, it is also possible to identify the knowledge structure of individual regions within the EU. We are particularly interested in exploring the knowledge cores of regions (Heimeriks & Balland, 2016), or how much of the technology produced within each NUTS-2 region (as captured by number of patents) tends to cluster around individual technological fields. Thus, for each region r, we calculated the density of technology production in the vicinity of individual technologies i.…”

Related variety and economic development: a literature review

“…What can be done in future studies is to analyse directly the impact of related variety on entrepreneurship, knowledge and innovation, which in turn are expected to lead to employment and exports. Quite some studies already analysed the effects of related and unrelated variety on patents as the dependent variable (Castaldi, Frenken, & Los, 2015;Kogler, Rigby, & Tucker, 2013;Rigby, 2015;Tanner, 2016;Tavassoli & Carbonara, 2014), but fewer of such studies exist looking at scientific publications Heimeriks & Balland, 2015) or new firm formation (Colombelli, 2016;Guo, He, & Li, 2016) as dependent variables. (8) Finally, related-variety studies hitherto focus on how related variety affects economic development, while research on the geography of knowledge recombination processes at the micro-level remains rather unconnected to the related-variety literature.…”

Relatedness and the geography of innovation

“…More recently, a few studies have started to investigate the role of relatedness in different scientific and technological contexts. Heimeriks and Balland (2016) investigate whether relatedness plays the same role in the spatial dynamics of four different fields in cities at the global level between 1996 and 2012. While they still identify a positive role for relatedness in all fields, that is, astrophysics, biotechnology, nanotechnology and organic chemistry, they also find remarkable differences in terms of magnitude.…”