Knowledge Creation and Innovation Beyond Agglomeration. The Case of Hidden Champions in Germany
Lukas Vonnahme (SFB 1199 & IfL)
Information
It is our pleasure to announce that another dissertation produced in the SFB 1199 has been successfully completed and is now ready to be publicly defended. Lukas Vonnahme will present and discuss his dissertation titled ‘Knowledge Creation Beyond Agglomeration: The case of Hidden Champions in Germany‘.
The event will take place online. You can join by clicking the button below.
Abstract
In debates on knowledge-based regional development, geographical proximity to cooperation partners is considered to be a key competitive advantage for innovative firms. In Germany, however, there are numerous companies outside agglomerations which, despite the supposed lack of geographical proximity to partners, are world market leaders in a specific technology area or product segment.
In the course of the project, the spatial practices of these highly innovative and internationally operating companies were analysed in a comparative perspective. Specifically, spatialization processes in the context of innovation activities of these companies were researched and it was asked how companies identify sources of knowledge and how they make these sources available.
It could be shown that companies act according to similar principles regardless of their spatial location and use identical spatial formats for knowledge generation. A comparison of world market leaders located inside and outside of agglomerations shows no significant differences with regard to their collaborations. Both groups are comparable with regard to information sources used, the spatial location of their partners as well as the innovation projects they carry out. Furthermore, no particular relevance of regional forms of cooperation could be proven, which is surprising especially against the background of the debates on territorial innovation models.
The results feed into current debates in economic geography, which highlight both options of intra-firm innovation activities, which are less based on interaction, as well as different types and formats of knowledge transfer over distance as being important for innovative enterprises. In light of the project results, the relevance of the link between innovation and agglomeration – at least for the German context – must be regarded and questioned as predominantly discursively charged.
Biographical Note
Having studied Human Geography in Marburg, Lund and Frankfurt from 2008 to 2014, Lukas Vonnahme joined the Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig in 2014. After he worked for a regional economic development agency in Stuttgart in 2015, he obtained his position as a researcher and PhD candidate within the project “Peripheral but Global: World Market Leaders outside of Agglomerations”, which was part of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” from 2016 to 2019. His research interests include regional economic development, processes of knowledge creation in space, and innovation management.