Geographic Distribution

Geographic Distribution Economic growth requires innovation, and it is concentrated in places that possess a well-developed technological infrastructure. This infrastructure consists of sources of knowledge. Innovation is not always successful everywhere unless it meets the requirements of the objectives of learning and teaching at a particular place. It is not always successful to apply a good innovation from one place to another because each environment is different from the other. In recent years, geographers have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the innovation process by exploring the diffusion of innovation, the location of R&D, and the geography of high-technology industry. The article, Ў°The Geographic Sources of Innovation: Technological Infrastructure and Product Innovation in the United States,Ў± Feldman and Florida examine the geographic sources of innovation, focusing specifically on the relationship between product innovation and the underlying "tec

hnological infrastructure" of particular places. This infrastructure comprises of agglomerations of firms in related manufacturing industries, geographic concentrations of industrial R&D, concentrations of university R&D, and business-service firms. Once in place, these geographic concentrations of infrastructure increase the capacity for innovation, as regions come to specialize in particular technologies and industrial sectors. Geography organizes this infrastructure by bringing together the crucial resources and inputs for the innovation process in particular places. Using a direct measure of commercial product innovation, an empirical model of the geography is presented. The model tests the hypothesis that innovation is concentrated in places that possess a well-developed technological infrastructure. The analysis confirms and extends this hypothesis; innovations cluster geographically in areas that contain geographic concentrations of specialized resources indicative of technolo

gical infrastructure. The spatial concentrations of specialized resources are mutually and positively, reinforce a regionЎЇs capacity to innovate. Different places came to have different regional specialization and it created the geographic distribution in the United States through many reasons.

First, Feldman and Florida states the geographic distribution of product innovation is highly concentrated among states; Ў°Eleven states accord for 81 percent of the 4,200 innovations.Ў± Especially, the rates of product innovation in New Jersey, Massachusetts and California are double the national rate. Furthermore, this regional distribution is also related to co-relationship with university R&D. For example, the broad infrastructure for electronics-related innovation that has grown up in CaliforniaЎЇs Silicon Valley located between Stanford and UC Berkley and similarly, New Jersey, with its world-class pharmaceutical and chemical complexes, leads in innovations related to drugs and medicine located between Harvard and MIT. This shows that the companies where they require high technology are located near the universities, which universities has known for the best school for R&D. Also, many of data shows that those two regions have the most patents over the country because patents ar

e highly correlated with research and development expenditure at the firm level, and they are significantly correlated with the locational distribution of innovation.