The Geography of Complex Knowledge

Complex Economic Activities Concentrate in Large Cities

“…Two recently developed strands of literature can shed some light on the factors that explain the variation of spatial concentration across activities: the literature on urban concentration (4) and the literature on economic complexity (5)(6)(7). The literature on urban concentration shows evidence that economic outputs increase faster than city size (they scale super-linearly) (4).…”

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies César Hidalgo, New York 2015: Basic Books, 256 pp. $ 26.99. ISBN: 0141978031, 9780141978031

“…Simple economic activities, for example, tend to be more ubiquitous, while complex economic activities will be more unequally distributed. This empirical pattern holds for both products (Hidalgo & Hausmann ) and technologies (Balland & Rigby ). Interestingly, these complex activities are not randomly distributed; they tend to be disproportionally found in regions with a diverse set of knowledge and knowhow.…”

Impacts of EU funded R&D networks on the generation of key enabling technologies: Empirical evidence from a regional perspective

“…In innovation economics, heterogeneities between technologies are usually investigated with respect to the complexity of knowledge combinations (Antonelli, 2011;Balland & Rigby, 2017;Fleming & Sorenson, 2001), the learning processes according to the nature of the knowledge base (Asheim, 2007;Moodysson, 2008), or the development stage of a technology and its relatedness to existing knowledge (Anderson & Tushman, 1990;Heimeriks & Boschma, 2014). Implicitly or explicitly, each approach may bear different indications for the predominant spatial structure and relevance of collaborative networks.…”