The Influence Of Proximity On Technological Innovation

Technological innovation is fundamental to economic growth. The concern for the link between geography and technology is nowadays one of the major focus points in spatial economies and gives rise to a number of valuable researches. Based on the contribution of the research on US and European region, the researchers and the authority realized that proximity is a necessary condition to benefit from spillovers and to pursue a good innovative performance. Knowledge externalities are at the heart of an understanding of the role of proximity in the innovation process. Nevertheless, the association between externalities and proximity is not obvious and deserves specification. It is necessary to empirically assess whether technological spillover have a geographic dimension. The aim of this paper is to discuss the proximity effects on the multi-dimension innovative performance in terms of appropriate measurement.The paper provides a brief review of the relationship between proximity and knowledge spillovers, and defines the relative concept about technology innovation. After investigating technological innovation from the perspective of knowledge characteristics, we focus on the requirement condition of spatial proximity for the tacit knowledge transmission.Based on the firm's spatial characteristic and the tacit characteristic of technological knowledge, we assume the spillover depends on the geographical distance between the firms, and is a positive and decreasing function of the distance. On the base of previous literatures'contribution, we consider a three-stage game to investigate the association between firm's location choice and R&D activities.The technological innovation of firms may facilitate cluster innovation and boost the competitiveness. The proximity is seen as a prerequisite for the creation of close inter-firm relations based on trust and reciprocity, facilitation transfer of tacit knowledge. In geographical terms this can result in local or regional agglomerations of firms and other actors, which are seen to possess a number of competitive advantages. We examine the effects of proximity on innovation process comprehensively and admit the negative effect of"lock in". We further introduce the organizational proximity as the complementary effect, and conclude that should balance the two category proximity effects in the process of technology innovation and diffusion. The above theoretic analysis is tested by the case studies. What's more, the author changes the research field from firm and cluster's dimension to regional dimension. Most of the studies considering the local innovation phenomena rely on the concept of spillovers. Despite their integration in different analysis, externalities and the idea of proximity are often associated. Here, we estimate the relevance of the presence of externalities in the process of spatial creation and dissemination of knowledge which may cross the boundaries of regions by means of the spatial econometrics analysis. In some extent, it reinforces the previous research ignoring the existing spatial effect and induces the model more reasonable. Further, the efficiency of the conclusion derived from the above model may be more powerful. Based on the analysis method of endogenous growth theory, we investigate the influence of externalities on technology across regional economies, on steady state levels of production and on the process of growth. Speak concretely, on the hypothesis of existence of externalities across regions, innovative output growth depends on the initial level of innovative productivity in the neighbors and their rate of growth. We design the innovative output growth model and estimate theβconvergence in the period 1985-2004. The conclusions made from these empirical analyses are of some value to the reality and the policy making in China.After considering the technological innovation on the dimensions of micro-, meso-, and macro-, the link between proximity and innovation has been dwelled upon extensively in the literature. We integrating the concept of regional accessibility into innovation process make the proximity effect operational. Computing accessibility makes proximity operational, thus spatial proximity in some extent depends on the efficiency of accessibility. The results coming from the systematical study on the close link between regional accessibility and regional innovation system carry great policy and referential value for China authority to construct successful coherent innovation system.