E-Capital and Economic Growth in European Metropolitan Areas: Applying Social Media Messaging in Technology-Based Urban Analysis

ABSTRACT

Innovation is an elemental part of regional economic growth. In the past years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled new means for data collection, and analysis for the study of regional innovation systems. This paper investigates innovation and technology messaging in Twitter, which has been described as the SMS of the Internet. The concept of electronic capital (e-capital) is applied in order to find out how technology messaging relates to the economic situation in metropolitan areas. The recently introduced concept of e-capital is cultivated from the conceptualizations of innovation acknowledging that different forms of capital, including human, social, and economic, circulate and have an effect on each other. The analysis indicates that clusters of e-capital and potential growth clusters are identifiable by using Twitter activity. In Europe, e-capital agglomerates to previously identified clusters of the “Blue Banana” and the “Golden Banana” (or the “Sun Belt”). Based on spatial statistics, we apply Categories of Metropolitan Areas (COMAs) in order to classify Twitter intensive locations across Europe. We defined four COMAs and estimated their e-capital potential. The most problematic COMA lies in Eastern Europe whereas the strongest concentration is found in Western Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Electronic capital
• economic growth
• metropolitan areas
• social capital
• social media
• Twitter

Acknowledgments

The authors thank three anonymous referees for their constructive comments on improving the paper.

Notes on Contributors

Juho Kiuru is a PhD student in the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Tommi Inkinen is a professor in the Department of Geosciences and Geography and the research director of the Center for Maritime Studies at the University of Turku, Finland.

ORCID

Tommi Inkinen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6682-043X

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Helsinki Metropolitan Region Urban Research Program.