Firm Knowledge, Neighborhood Diversity and Innovation

This paper tests the importance of firm level knowledge and neighborhood diversity, as a source for localized knowledge spillovers, on firms propensity to innovate. Diversity is measured in terms of industries as well as employee education and occupation, of which the results show a positive neighborhood effect from diversity in education. In addition, an added positive effect from neighborhood diversity in education is found for firms with a larger share of highly educated employees, which points to the importance of absorptive capacity. However, firm characteristics, such as the knowledge of the own employees, provide to be the strongest determinants for the innovativeness of firms.