equipment company may locate out of the agglomeration zones indicated in this paper.
Table 10 shows the regional distribution of the new medical equipment companies
located in Technology Parks and Business Innovation Centers. These companies are
developing medical equipments of high technological content and many of them are
spin□offs. For example, the two companies located in the Business Innovation Center of
Aragon are spin□offs from research projects, one from a university department and the
other from a medical instruments company. The degree of spatial concentration
indicated in Table 10 is very low in comparison with the distribution of medical
equipment manufacturers (Table 2), which had 80% of firms and employment located
in only two regions.
Table 10. Regional distribution of medical equipment companies located at Technology Parks and
Business Innovation Centers
|
Andalucia________________________ |
5 |
|
Aragon________________________ |
2 |
|
Basque Country_________________ |
2 |
|
Catalonia_________________________ |
3 |
|
Community of Valencia___________ |
1 |
|
Galicia_____________________________ |
2 |
|
Navarra__________________________ |
1 |
|
Total firms________________________ |
17 |
Source-. Own production
Conclusion
In this paper we have carried out an analysis of the spatial distribution of innovative
technology in the medical equipment industry using patent grants per region of
residence of the first applicant as an indicator. The spatial distribution of the results of
the technological process (patent grants per region of residence of the first applicant)
shows a polarization towards the two large urban agglomerations of Barcelona and
Madrid, while the rest is shared by the Community of Valencia and the Basque
Country.
The spatial distribution of patenting has been found to be positively correlated with
networking and local proximity to hospitals. The explanatory model has not found a
significant contribution of agglomeration to patenting intensity which allows for the
possibility that small ‘hiDtech’ medical equipment firms may develop and locate in
peripheral regions. Due to low transportation costs of most of medical instruments to
15