Innovation, agglomeration, and regional development

By Ian Richard Gordon, Philip McCann. 2005

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides a critical examination of the widely disseminated view that innovation in all or most activities is favoured by certain common characteristics in the local 'milieu', involving a cluster of many small firms benefiting from flexible inter-firm alliances, supported by mutual information exchanges of both an informal and formal nature. The general applicability of this model, and the localness of crucial linkages, is questioned initially on the basis of a review of different hypotheses about the geography of innovation. Moreover, examination of new survey evidence from a large number of firms in the London conurbation suggests that the importance of specifically local informal information spillovers for successful innovation is very much more limited than has been suggested, as are the supposed advantages of firm smallness. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f1a3801696d7393309f5b4be2a933fcaabe952f

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Citations in the corpus

Human Capital, Graduate Migration and Innovation in British Regions (2008, background): “…of innovation tends to focus primarily on innovation as measured by either patent citations (Jaffe et al. 1993) or R&D expenditure (Acs 2002), and also focuses on mainly manufacturing innovations, with much less evide nce being available concerning the service industries (Gordon and McCann 2005).”
Innovation, quality management and learning: Short-term and longer-term effects (2017, background): “Numerous scholars have attempted to explain why some firms are more likely to innovate, with firm characteristics, such as size, sector, ownership, and location being identified as influential drivers of innovation output (Audretsch and Feldman, 1996; Boschma, 2005; Gordon and McCann, 2005; Jordan a”
Human capital flows and regional knowledge assets: a simultaneous equation approach (2006, background): “16 The negative relationship between INN and POP is consistent with the fact that much UK innovation actually takes place outside of the major cities and often in rather smaller urban centres (Simmie, 2002; Gordon and McCann, 2005).”
Geographical pathways for SME internationalization: insights from an Italian sample (2013, background): “A large number of studies (Gordon and McCann, 2005; Malmberg and Maskell, 1999) have argued and empirically tested the claim that SMEs localized inside an industrial district benefit from this location.”
The structure and evolution of industrial clusters: Transactions, technology and knowledge spillovers (2006, background): “Subsequently, market competition during the second half of the twentieth century (Casson and McCann, 1999) transformed these markets from social networks to something which now approximates the pure agglomeration model (Gordon and McCann, 2000, 2005a).”
Migrant and ethnic diversity, cities and innovation: Firm effects or city effects? (2015, background): “External knowledge sourcing of this form is strongly associated with innovation, and firms taking advice should to be more innovative (Gordon and McCann, 2005).”
Immigration and Innovation in European Regions (2011, background): “They contribute to the population growth of cities, which reinforces agglomeration – with positive benefits for innovation and growth (e.g. Audretch, 1998; Gordon and McCann, 2005; Kerr, 2010).”
National innovation systems and the intermediary role of industry associations in building institutional capacities for innovation in developing countries: a critical review of the literature (2015, background): “Innovation, understood as the recombination of existing ideas or the generation of new ideas into new processes and products (Freeman and Soete, 1997; Gordon and McCann, 2005) is widely viewed as the main driver of growth in modern capitalistic economies (Rodríguez-Pose and Crescenzi, 2008).”
Sketching Out a Model of Innovation, Face-to-face Interaction and Economic Geography (2007, background): “…life cycles are very long, or firms in industries in which customer contact is relatively less important, in or in industries which are based primarily on very long contractual relationships, will benefit relatively less from face-to-face contact (Gordon & McCann, 2005b; Iammarino & McCann, 2006).”