Does Successful Innovation Require Large Urban Areas? Germany as a Counterexample
以德国为反例，挑战创新活动必须集中在大城市的理论，指出政治分裂历史塑造了分散的定居结构、大学分布和融资渠道，从而影响创新活动的空间布局。
Popular theories claim that innovation activities should be located in large cities because of more favorable environmental conditions that are absent in smaller cities or peripheral areas. Germany provides a counterexample to such theories. We argue that a major reason behind the geography of innovation in Germany is the country’s pronounced legacy of political fragmentation that created a decentralized settlement structure, shaped the geographic distribution of universities and public research institutions, and brought about a rather uniform and local access to finance. We show how political fragmentation influenced the emergence of historic centers of knowledge production and impacts the positioning of innovation activities today. We conclude that institutional factors should play a more prominent role in theories that aim at explaining the spatial distribution of innovation activities.