Servitizing industrial regions

ABSTRACT

The paper explores the evolving role of service sectors in relation to manufacturing activities within local systems of production and it discusses whether issues related to spatial proximity have shaped the value chains of manufacturing activities. Territorial servitization is defined here as the symbiotic recoupling between services and manufacturing that impacts on their relative value creation contribution to both value chains and consumers. The paper presents empirical evidence from the UK by means of employment data at the NUTS-2 level and by five-digit sector level.

KEYWORDS:

• servitization
• regional economies
• manufacturing
• knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS)

JEL:

• L84
• R11

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See the special issues in Strategic Change (Vendrell-Herrero, Parry, Bustinza, & O'Regan, 2014) and Industrial Marketing Management (Kowalkowski, Gebauer, Kamp, & Parry, 2017).

2. We use the classification provided by the European Commission (2012).

3. Since the European Commission (2012) uses a definition of KIBS sectors based on a NACE rev 1.1 classification; correspondence tables provided by EUROSTAT have been used to obtain a definition of KIBS sectors based on NACE rev. 2, which is consistent with data we collected. Conceiving KIBS as a subset of KIS (European Commission, 2012), when applying correspondence tables, we excluded from KIBS all the NACE rev. 2 activities not included in KIS according to the EUROSTAT classification of ‘High-tech industry and knowledge-intensive services’. Furthermore, to avoid overlap between KIS and KIBS sectors, we excluded from KIS the activities included in KIBS sectors.

4. In 2010, Inner and Outer London, and Gloucestershire and Wiltshire had both LQs for KIS and KIBS ≥ 1.

5. We calculate all LQs without London and the negative relationship between KIBS and both high- to medium-tech manufacturing and medium- to low-tech manufacturing remains valid.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the European Union under the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project ‘MAKERS: Smart Manufacturing for EU Growth and Prosperity’ [grant number H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015-691192].