Regions on course for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the role of a strong indigenous T-KIBS sector

ABSTRACT

From the perspective that a region’s industrial development mostly builds upon existing local capability endowments to form a trajectory of related diversifications, we argue that regions with a strong technology-based knowledge-intensive business service (T-KIBS) sector potentially have resource-based relatedness in their ‘knowledge space’ allowing their local manufacturing sector to diversify production more easily towards Industry 4.0. The study assays whether the internal configuration of the local KIBS sector contributes to the economic outcome of local industry by implementing spatial econometrics models on a regionalized database for 24 European Union countries.

KEYWORDS:

• knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) sector
• technology-based knowledge-intensive business service (T-KIBS)
• related diversification
• territorial servitization
• Fourth Industrial Revolution

JEL:

• L26
• O14
• R58

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Esteban Lafuente acknowledges the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [grant number ECO2017-86305-C4-2-R]. Ferran Vendrell-Herrero acknowledges the financial support from FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades – Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain [grant number PGC2018-101022-A-100].