Local opportunities and innovative behaviour: a meta-analytic study on European cities

This paper addresses the issue of technogenesis and investigates in an exploratory way whether local factors are important for innovativeness of firms. Particular attention is given to the knowledge base of cities. The paper aims also to model effects of relevant local factors on innovativeness of firms by means of logit analysis and a qualitative impact approach based on the recently developed rough set analysis. Cities in three European countries are considered. Our empirical results from these cities show, first, that local factors are more important for more innovative than less innovative industries and more important for product than process innovations. Assuming a product life cycle path, these results imply that the evolution of the importance of local factors for innovations reflects a distinct time path. Second, among more than 20 local factors, the interviewed firms appear to consider support measures for skills training particularly important for innovations. Accordingly, the results of our logit models reveal that in particular skills training links with a local university contribute significantly to the propensity to innovate.