Metropolitan Innovation in the New Economy

Abstract

This paper analyzes the high-tech economies of 350-plus metropolitan areas across the U.S. during 2010. Attention is given to 20 different production attributes-including the age and education of the workforce, patent production, business startups, per capita productivity of the workers, and the like. Multivariate analysis is used to reduce these 20 attributes down to 10 orthogonal dimensions; then the scores on these dimensions are used to identify eight different innovation and entrepreneurial clubs. Basically the exercise deconstructs the metropolitan economies into various parts so that each economy is assigned a signature score on each of the independent factors. High-tech places, which are especially active in both patents and startups, are shown to be more heterogeneous than low-tech places. Moreover, the recent growth and change seen in many metropolitan areas appears to be associated with the incidence of very different factors: population growth has been driven by forces that are different from those that have induced either employment change or productivity growth in those metropolitan areas.

The impact of localized innovations on the stock returns of tourism companies

“…This is due to the fact that the development of tacit knowledge occurs in a particular social (collaborative learning), cultural (same language, cultural codes, and communication standards), and institutional context. Thus, innovations are mainly developed in the network environment of regional (largely metropolitan), national, or international innovation systems (Asheim & Gertler, 2013;Mulligan, Reid, & Lehnert, 2017). Both systemic and spatial concepts of innovation diffusion are employed (Weidenfeld & Hall, 2014).…”

“…Geographical studies on tourism innovation have been conducted on local or regional scales (e.g., Booyens & Rogerson, 2016;Brouder, 2012;Mulligan et al, 2017;Sørensen, 2007), rather than on national or international ones. This is in line with the general tendency of economic geography research on innovation (Oinas & Malecki, 2002) and with the overall tendency of tourism innovation studies (Weidenfeld & Hall, 2014).…”

“…However, the tourism industry in rural areas often has significant impact on innovative local development (Brouder, 2012). Mulligan et al (2017) and Oinas and Malecki (2002) emphasized that the innovativeness of an economy depends on the quality of its institutions, above all (a) organizations, including universities and government laboratories, and (b) rules and regulations, including transparency, intellectual property rights, social inclusion, education, and training systems, as well as fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. However, the impact of institutions on the development of innovations in particular industries might be different (Nelson & Rosenberg, 1993).…”