Innovation, agglomeration, and regional development
批判了“本地环境促进创新”的流行观点，基于伦敦大都市区企业调查数据，发现本地非正式信息溢出和小企业优势对创新的作用远小于预期。
This paper provides a critical examination of the widely disseminated view that innovation in all or most activities is favoured by certain common characteristics in the local ‘milieu’, involving a cluster of many small firms benefiting from flexible inter-firm alliances, supported by mutual information exchanges of both an informal and formal nature. The general applicability of this model, and the localness of crucial linkages, is questioned initially on the basis of a review of different hypotheses about the geography of innovation. Moreover, examination of new survey evidence from a large number of firms in the London conurbation suggests that the importance of specifically local informal information spillovers for successful innovation is very much more limited than has been suggested, as are the supposed advantages of firm smallness.