Firms’ innovation performance and the role of the metropolitan location. Evidence from the European periphery

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the role of metropolitan location in explaining firms’ innovation performance while accounting for other internal and external determinants of innovation. Using micro-level dataset and controlling for firm-specific, sector-specific and region-specific features, we identify a nuanced effect of location within metropolitan areas on the innovative performance of companies The results prove to vary for the different measures of innovation output of firms and in particular there is no metropolitan advantage detected for binary self-declared measures of innovations. The advantage is detected for the count-based quantity of innovation measures which is shown to critically depend on the higher performance of metropolitan-based firms in patenting and licencing. The interlinkages between location and firm-size matter and the results are asymmetric with particular benefits arising for micro-firms in their patenting and licencing.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• regional innovation system
• logit model
• negative binomial model
• regional development

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous referees who provided very useful comments and suggestions for the previous versions of the manuscript.

We are grateful to Maciej Tarkowski for creating Figure.

In the empirical analysis, we utilize upon written permission the data gathered by the Institute for Development in the National Science Centre (NCN) grant no. 2012/05/B/HS4/04209.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki [UMO-2017/25/B/HS4/00162].