Agglomeration and Innovation

Gerald  Carlino; William R. Kerr

Chapter | Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics | 2015

Agglomeration and Innovation

Abstract

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities. Innovative activity tends to be more concentrated than industrial activity, and we discuss important findings from the literature about why this is so. We highlight the traits of cities (e.g., size, industrial diversity) that theoretical and empirical work link to innovation, and we discuss factors that help sustain these features (e.g., the localization of entrepreneurial finance).

Keywords: Industry clusters; Innovation and Invention; Industry Clusters; City; Innovation and Invention;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Read Now

Citation:

Carlino, Gerald, and William R. Kerr. "Agglomeration and Innovation." Chap. 6 in Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Volume 5, edited by Gilles Duranton, J. Vernon Henderson, and William C. Strange, 349–404. Elsevier, 2015.

This primer is meant to be a field guide to the late 2010s' surge in business use of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI), or enterprise software based in machine learning. First, it provides an overview of the key trends - digitization, connectivity, the continuation of Moore's law, and advancements in machine learning algorithms - which led to the inflection point in adoption of AI. Then, the primer describes the range of use cases of state-of-the-art enterprise AI organized in a taxonomy designed to build generalized understanding of the types of work to which AI can be applied. This knowledge is useful not only to managers looking to best leverage the technology but to those working to manage resulting organizational change and prepare the workforce for transitions into complementary tasks. Finally, key issues and implications of AI adoption are also discussed.

Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the growing influence of advanced technologies for businesses outside of traditional tech fields, the strains and backlash that tech clusters are experiencing, and emerging research questions for theory and empirical work.

Faculty & Research

Agglomeration and Innovation

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author