In recent study published soon, we tested whether clusters of innovation locate in proximity of human capital, i.e. skilled, educated and tolerant workforce. We found out that this holds true in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. However, as a grace note we were able to show evidence of agglomeration externalities in the HMA.
We concluded that "urban density is an essential, and often underrated, circumstance for innovative growth. Considering planning and the mixed land use paradigm, the results show evidently that innovations emerge the best in dense and mixed urban structure." "The geographical characteristics are that clusters of innovation and human capital as well as clusters with potential growth form a larger spatial entity (an innovation “horseshoe”). Finding is in line with “Smart Café City” concept (Fu 2007), where human capital externalities are highly localized in the most central areas of the metropolitan areas."
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Antwerp is the Innovation Capital of Europe, Utrecht both the Startup Capital and the Tech Capital14/10/2016 Everybody likes rankings. So I ranked European metropolises using twitter data I blogged about last time. I ranked cities regarding to Twitter activity related to innovations, start ups and tech. It seems like the innovation capital of Europe is Antwerp followed by Utrecht, which in turn is both the start up capital and the tech capital of Europe. Top tens consist of cities from Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Austria. All from the core areas of Europe or from the so called Blue Banana, or near it. This is despite the fact that the rankings were made of relative amount of tweets per inhabitants. This is another finding suggesting agglomeration economies benefit the most urbanized areas. In addition to innovation ranking, start up ranking and tech ranking, I will include whole data set which contains absolute number of tweets as well as tweets per 1000 inhabitants of every European metropolitan area. Feel free to do your own rankings or analyses of the data!
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Photo by Rob Hurson
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July 2018
AuthorJuho Kiuru, geographer living in Helsinki, Finland. |