Search

Abstract: The effectiveness of Science and Technology Parks (STPs) as instruments of innovation policy has generated thriving debate among academics, practitioners and policy makers. A gap in the existing literature on STPs is that research mostly does not consider STPs' heterogeneity. The present paper aims at filling this gap, analysing the influence of different STP characteristics on their tenants' performance. Using data on 849 firms and 25 STPs from the 2009 Community Innovation Survey for Spain and a survey of STP managers respectively and after controlling for a wide set of firms characteristics, we find that: (i) firms located in very new or longer established STPs show better innovative performance; (ii) the size of the STP and its management company positively affects the innovative performance of tenants while services provision has no effect on firms' achieving better results; and (iii) firms in less technologically developed regions benefit more from location in an STP. Theoretical, policy and managerial contributions of our research are discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sense of belonging is a crucial factor determining the identification of the firms in industrial districts. From the social capital perspective, this paper analyses how the structural and relational dimensions of social capital determine a firm's sense of belonging to the industrial district. The study analyses a sample of 213 companies belonging to two Spanish industrial districts. Results of the survey offer an important contribution to the specific literature by finding the explanatory factors with which to distinguish between groups according to their level of embeddedness in the district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the spatial pattern of just-in-time (JIT) adoption for a sample of medium-sized and large Spanish manufacturing firms. JIT differs from other advanced manufacturing technologies because it relates directly to the spatial co-ordination of firms' internal production organisation with the external productive environment and depends on the quality of the transport system. Our results confirm the distinctive role of location for JIT adoption even after controlling for industry and plant-specific differences. We find that JIT adoption is greater in smaller cities but with higher transport accessibility indicating that urban congestion in larger urban areas likely reduces the benefits that firms may obtain from JIT implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]