Scientific knowledge dynamics and relatedness in biotech cities

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of scientific relatedness on knowledge dynamics in biotech at the city level during the period 1989-2008. We assess the extent to which the emergence of new research topics and the disappearance of existing topics in cities are dependent on their degree of scientific relatedness with existing topics in those cities. We make use of the rise and fall of title words in scientific publications in biotech to identify major cognitive developments within the field. We determined the degree of relatedness between 1028 scientific topics in biotech by means of co-occurrence of pairs of topics in journal articles. We combined this relatedness indicator between topics in biotech with the scientific portfolio of cities (i.e. the topics on which they published previously) to determine how cognitively close a potentially new topic (or an existing topic) is to the scientific portfolio of a city. We analyzed knowledge dynamics at the city level by looking at the entry and exit of topics in the scientific portfolio of 276 cities in the world. We found strong and robust evidence that new scientific topics in biotech tend to emerge systematically in cities where scientifically related topics already exist, while existing scientific topics had a higher probability to disappear from a city when these were weakly related to the scientific portfolio of the city.

Related variety and economic development: a literature review

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Regional Branching and Key Enabling Technologies: Evidence from European Patent Data

“…Several cases of regional branching have been documented in different geographic contexts, especially in technological terms, by looking at the role of related (and unrelated) variety in the dynamics of scientific knowledge and technological innovations in local areas (Kogler, Rigby, and Tucker 2013;Boschma, Heimeriks, and Balland 2014;Colombelli, Krafft, and Quatraro 2014;Tanner 2014;Backman and Lööf 2015;Boschma, Balland, and Kogler 2015;Castaldi, Frenken, and Los 2015;Rigby 2015).…”

The spatial configuration of innovation networks in China

“…Both drive the processes of interactive innovation (Fitjar and Rodríguez-Pose 2015). In verifying this argument, some recent empirical studies have clearly shown that firms tend to search for new cooperation actors or establish branches in similarly specialized clusters and/or metropolitan areas so as to obtain more unconscious knowledge spillover (Poon et al 2013;Boschma et al 2014;Gabe and Abel 2016). In addition, due to their importance for the availability of highly qualified labor (Ponds et al 2010;Huggins et al 2014), the presence of academic research institutes and universities is expected to influence the local actors' knowledge base and their innovation potential.…”