Are firms in clusters really more innovative?

By Catherine Beaudry, Stefano Breschi. 2003

364 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines empirically whether firms located in strong industrial clusters are more innovative than firms located outside these regions. The study performs a firm-level analysis for two countries: Italy and the United Kingdom. European patent data for the period 1990-98 are used as indicator of firms' innovative activity, and are related to employment in the region where the firms are located, and other cluster-specific and firm-specific variables. The main result of the paper is that clustering alone is not conducive to higher innovative performance. Whereas location in a cluster densely populated by other innovative firms positively affects the likelihood of innovating, quite strong disadvantages seem to arise from the presence of non-innovative firms in a firm's own industrial sector. Regarding the impact of other industrial sectors, preliminary results seem to indicate, in the case of Italy, that a strong presence of firms in other related industries spurs innovative performance.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfe32ac171419708b2216bf1836b2b0715c5f115

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Industrial Development: Geography and the Creative Field Revisited (2006, background): “Beaudry and Breschi (2003), Breschi (1999), and Lamoreaux and Sokoloff (2000) show that numerous cases exist of industrial clusters that fail to demonstrate any proclivity whatever to innovation.”
Are regional systems greening the economy? Local spillovers, green innovations and firms’ economic performances (2016, background): “…as Italy, where industry is historically structured as a ‘web’ of SMEs, which are often ‘organised’ into districts and that exploit networking and cooperation activities as firm’s resources, enhancing competitiveness through knowledge transfer (Boschma and Lambooy 2002; Beaudry and Breschi 2003).”
Geographical proximity and innovation: Evidences from the Campos Basin oil & gas industrial agglomeration—Brazil (2009, background): “Indeed, some empirical studies point out an abundance of non-dynamic, nonmature, static, declining, out-of-date, quasi-dead, stagnated, dead clusters (Malmberg and Maskell, 2002; Martin and Sunley, 2003; Beaudry and Breschi, 2003; Batista and Swann, 1998; Boschma, 2004).”
How does industry specialization affect the efficiency of regional innovation systems? (2010, background): “…may promote a high level of knowledge spillovers between the firms which are sharing the same technological base (Mowery, Oxley, and Silverman 1998; Beaudry and Breschi 2003); • geographically bounded knowledge spillovers may be conductive for local collective learning processes (Lawson and…”
Who's right, Marshall or Jacobs? The localization versus urbanization debate (2009, background): “Other varitions frequently encountered are the innovation diversity index ased on patent data (Beaudry and Breschi, 2003) or the industry iversity index based on industry value-added data (Batisse, 2002). his Hirschman–Herfindahl index is also presented in modified orms, as inversed…”
Managing external knowledge flows: The moderating role of absorptive capacity (2009, background): “Whether or not knowledge flows are localized geographically, s exposed to the same amount of external knowledge flows ght not derive equal benefits, because they differ in their abilto identify and exploit such flows (Beaudry and Breschi, 2003; liani and Bell, 2005).”
Desperately Seeking Spillovers?: Increasing Returns, Industrial Organization and the Location of New Entrants in Geographic and Technological Space (2007, positive): “…concentrated in their own broadly defined (2-digit) industries tended to grow faster and produce more innovation when compared to more isolated firms located in regions that were concentrated in (2-digit) industries other than their own (Baptista and Swann, 1998; Beaudry and Breschi, 2003).”
Industrial Dynamics and Clusters: A Survey (2015, background): “For studies on the relation between clustering and innovation, see BAPTISTA and SWANN (1999), BEAUDRY and BRESCHI (2003), and FOLTA et al. (2006).”
Management control systems in innovation companies: a literature based framework (2014, background): “Research shows that companies that are part of a cluster tend to be more innovative and have higher growth rates than other companies in the same industry (e.g. Baptista and Swann 1998; Beaudry and Breschi 2003; Enright 2003).”
The effect of clusters on the survival and performance of new firms (2010, neutral): “Beaudry and Breschi (2003) examined the impact of agglomeration on patenting among firms in 65 UK counties and 95 Italian provinces.”
The impact of R&D offshoring on the home knowledge production of OECD investing regions (2012, background): “…significance of geographical proximity has been also confirmed in studies of knowledge spillovers (Jaffe, Trajtenberg and Henderson, 1993; Feldman, 1994; Audretsch and Feldman, 1996) as well as by the literature on clusters (Porter, 1990; Beaudry and Breschi, 2003; Iammarino and McCann, 2006).”
Location Matters: Where We Have Been and Where We Might Go in Agglomeration Research (2008, background): “Beaudry and Breschi (2003) found an association between cluster-level stock of knowledge and patenting levels.”