Paradigm changes in technological knowledge connections in urban innovation systems

Abstract

The late twentieth century marked the advent of a new information based and internationally networked paradigm, much different from its old science-based predecessor. As we enter the diffusion stage of this paradigm, we expect to see changes in the way organizations and locations interact with one another. We envision that cities and clusters will not rely exclusively on local knowledge sources but will need to combine local with complementary geographically distant (trans-local) knowledge sources. This chapter contributes to the literature on the changing geographic composition of knowledge connections in the new paradigm. Using social network analysis techniques, we construct a unidirectional network of 62 selected cities, since backward citations point in just one direction to prior knowledge sources. We observe how the spatial distribution of our technological network changes during our time period, both in the aggregate and at the level of five selected sectors. The nodes in our network represent cities while the edges represent citations from one city to another. We calculate network statistics such as degree strength and eigenvector centrality to determine which cities have gained influence over time and which cities have become relatively less important. Overall, we observe that the technological knowledge network between our cities is getting denser and more dispersed over our time period. We see that many developing cities are gradually increasing in their centrality to our constructed network and that this increase in centrality is more pronounced in certain sectors, characteristic of the new paradigm, such as the ICT sector. We also observe that while developing cities have become important sources of technological knowledge, they still lag in terms of the knowledge they receive from external sources.