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Figure 1: Distribution of firms (0%) according to the importance they ascribed to the lack of
information on market opportunities as a barrier to innovation, by regions
□ metropolitan □ periphery
As one can expected the importance ascribed to the lack of skilled personnel, as limited the
engagement in innovation, is much higher in the periphery than in the metropolitan area (see
Figure 1). This result from the large pull of highly skilled labor that exist in the metropolitan
area, in contrast to the peripheral region. The obtained results show an extreme distribution of
the firms according to their location, expressed in relative large gap in the edges. High rate of
the firms located in the metropolitan zone - 27.9%, indicated that this factor has no
significance effect so ever on the ability to innovate, where only 14.8% of the firms located in
the peripheral region did. Conversely higher rate of the firms located in the periphery
indicates this factor as crucial in constitute barriers to innovative success, in comparison to the
rate of firms in the metropolitan area (18.2% and 11.5% respectively).
The opposite trend obtained in figure 2 related to the lack of information on market
opportunities. Here the advantage is to the peripheral region where less of firms their indicate
this barrier as significant. The results show high gradient in the distribution of the firms
located in the periphery, where two third of them ascribed no significant or just slightly
significant impact of this barrier on the success of innovation, and only 13.6% indicated it as
very significant or crucial. On the other hand, the distribution of the firms located in the
metropolitan area is more balanced. Here more than quarter of the firms indicated the lack of
information on market opportunity as very significant or crucial to the ability to innovate.
However, a high rate of the firms (56.6%) ascribed only slightly significant impact or non-at
all on innovation. Why the metropolitan area enjoy from less accessible information on
market opportunities than the peripheral region does? It is hypothesized that this effect by the
different industrial structure characterized the two regions. There is much more firms belong