Knowledge, Innovation and Agglomeration: regionalized multiple indicators and evidence
from Brazil
Introduction
This article is thematically linked to a body of literature that studies the relationships
between geography and innovation, a field that has become increasingly multidisciplinary,
combining elements of economic geography, industrial organization, innovation economics,
international trade, and the economics of the firm.
The lines of research that have drawn most attention in this field include the application of
innovation activity indicators for a number of purposes: measuring the occurrence of knowledge
spillovers in delimited territorial spaces, assessing the technological efforts of firms, and proving
that there is a correlation between geographical location and innovation, among others. The
present paper follows this line of research by propounding a methodology based on multiple
indicators that can be used to map the regional distribution of innovation activities, and applying
it for the sake of illustration to Brazilian data for the state of Sao Paulo.
The logic of the argument is that the regional distribution of science, technology and
innovation activities reflects the regional distribution of the knowledge that substantiates
technical, scientific and technological capabilities. These capabilities in turn induce the
localization of productive activities and the formation of agglomerations of firms, often leading
to the creation of clusters or geographically circumscribed production and innovation systems.
Thus the paper develops and applies a set of regionalized indicators based on: (1) the regional
distribution of skilled jobs, innovative firms, patent and trademark applications, and published
scientific articles; and (2) the regional network of higher education institutions, vocational and
technical schools, research centers, laboratories and other service entities constituting the
scientific and technological infrastructure that supports the innovation activities of business
organizations.
The principle underlying our use of multiple indicators is that the technological efforts of
firms depend on a far wider array of factors than can be captured by indicators based on only one
type of information, such as patent citations, for example. However, the elaboration of several
types of indicators evidently depends in the last analysis on the availability of databases with
sufficient quality and detail to serve as a source of regionalized information. This is not always
the case, owing to restrictions imposed by specific legislation designed to protect the
confidentiality of personal data. These and other limitations of the databases involved are noted
below.
The paper is organized as follows. The first section reviews the literature, focusing
specifically on work that discusses the geographical distribution of innovation activities from the
empirical standpoint. The second section presents a set of quantitative indicators, their respective
methodologies and databases, and the results of their application to Sao Paulo State. The next
section summarizes our survey of the network of scientific, technological and service
infrastructure institutions that support firms in the state. The fourth part of the paper utilizes a
vertical cross-section to analyze the results from the standpoint of clusters or local production and
innovation systems. This is the basis for an assessment of the extent to which the localization of
productive activities and the agglomeration of firms in clusters or local production and
innovation systems correlate with the pattern of geographical distribution of knowledge and
technological infrastructure institutions displayed by the indicators, as illustrated by the analysis
of a specific case: the local production and innovation system in the Campinas micro-region. The