Are firms in clusters really more innovative?

Abstract

This paper examines empirically whether firms located in strong industrial clusters are more innovative than firms located outside these regions. The study performs a firmlevel 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 seems 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.

Uncontrolled Keywords

Clusters, Innovation, Knowledge, Agglomeration economies