Emil ISRAEL, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Salinger EYAL, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
The growing body of literature that explores innovation in peripheries has not shaken the mainstream narrative that associates innovation with core regions. Economic cores, which are usually metropolitan regions, are characterized by an innovative ‘milieu’ with ample and appropriate resources to stimulate innovation. The association of innovation with core regions is partly rooted in the focus on technological innovation, which is less studied outside of cities. That is, lagging regions that lack significant urban agglomerations and suffer from structural inferiority due to, among other things, lack of an appropriate milieu. To contend with this inferiority, contemporary regional policies emphasize new aspects of innovation. These endeavors advance non-technological forms of innovation, which do not necessarily require significant investments in R&D. However, the research regarding non-technological innovation and its location determinants in space is still relatively small. The current study explores how location in the geographical periphery as opposed to in core regions affects the probability of technologically and non-technologically innovating.
Drawing on a sample of more than 3,800 Israeli firms, we analyze how peripheral geographic location impacts their chances to innovate, in comparison to firms in the country’s core regions. The results show how the probabilities to technologically innovate in most of the defined peripheries significantly exceeds the probabilities in the core. Those probabilities decrease with the region’s increasing peripherality. Peripheral firms that do tend to technologically innovate were found to be deeply embedded in their region’s economy. Unlike technological innovation, peripheries' non-technological innovation activity was found to benefit from urban agglomerations that endow local economies with an (technological) innovative buzz. Minimizing the endowments, reduces firms’ chances to non-technologically innovate.
Mots clés : Technological Innovation|Non-technological Innovation|Core|Periphery|Lagging Regions
A103286EI