Which firms benefit more from being located in a Science and Technology Park? Empirical evidence for Spain

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyse the heterogeneous effect of Science and Technology Parks (STPs) on firms' innovation outcomes, contingent on firms' size and innovation effort. Despite the worldwide diffusion of STPs and the increasing literature aimed at analyzing their effect on tenants' performance, empirical evidence on the heterogeneous effect of STPs location on different firms is very scarce. We use information for a representative sample of 39,722 Spanish firms, 653 of them located on 22 of the 25 official Spanish STP. Results show, on the one hand, that firm size is negatively related to an STP location effect and, on the other, that only a small amount of internal innovation effort is required to achieve a very high return from park location.However, firms without innovation efforts do not benefit from a park location. Finally, as internal innovation efforts increase, the park effect reduces, but is still at a high level.

Government support and firm innovation performance in Chinese science and technology parks: The perspective of firm and sub‐park heterogeneity

“…The majority of the recent empirical literature on innovation use those two indicators as the dependent variables. Patent emphasizes firms' innovation achievements through their research activities and knowledge sharing with universities or research institutes, while patents measure inventions (not innovation) that may or may not result in commercialization and economic advantage, and are very unequal across sectors (Vasquez‐Urriago et al, 2016). New product, which refers to those products resulting from adopting new technological principles and new designs as well as those with significant improvement in structure, material, processing, etc.…”

“…over existing products (Sun & Du, 2010), stands for the commercialization of innovation as well as be applicable to all sectors. Following previous studies, we define LNPatent as the natural logarithm of the numbers of firms' patent applications per employee, and LNNewproduct is measured by the natural logarithm of the output value of new products per employee for a firm (Vasquez‐Urriago et al, 2016).…”

“…Additionally, old experienced firms may benefit more from export because they have learned how to do things better (Albahari et al, 2018). Firm's size is expected to have a positive relationship with a firm's innovation performance, since larger firms have more resources and might benefit from economies of scales and scope (Vasquez‐Urriago et al, 2016). We also control firm's export for it does force enterprises to develop patent and new products (Ubeda, Ortiz‐de‐Urbina‐Criado, & Mora‐Valentín, 2019).…”

“…Some authors have started to consider that not all the firms benefit homogeneously from being located in STPs (Caniels, 2003; Forman, Goldfarb, & Greenstein, 2006; Giuliani, 2007; Hervas‐Oliver & Albors‐Garrigos, 2009). Moreover, not only heterogeneity of firms but also that of the park, such as scale, location of political supports and so on, may influence the innovation performance of on‐site firms (Vasquez‐Urriago, Barge‐Gil, & Rico, 2016). It is essential to analyse which firms in which kinds of STPs benefit more empirically.…”

The influence of Science and Technology Park characteristics on firms' innovation results

“…firm) heterogeneity for agglomeration economies (e.g. Hervas‐Oliver et al ; Huang et al ; Rigby and Brown ; Knoben et al ; Vásquez‐Urriago et al ), while there is much less evidence on the supply‐side heterogeneity, especially for STPs. In particular, to our knowledge, there have been no attempts to systematically analyse which characteristics of STPs contribute to improving the innovative performance of firms.…”