The Economic Geography of Technological Standards: Evidence on the European GNSS Industry

Abstract

The concentration and dispersion of innovative activities in space has been largely explained and evidenced by the nature of knowledge and the geographical extent of knowledge spillovers. One of the empirical challenges is to go beyond by understanding how the geography of innovation is shaped by particular structural properties of knowledge networks. This paper contributes to this challenge, focusing on the particular case of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) at the European level. We exploit a database of R&D collaborative projects based on the 5th and 6th European Framework Programs, and apply social network analysis in economic geography. We study the properties of both network of organizations network and network of collaborative projects. We show that the nature of knowledge involved in relationships influences the geographical and structural organizations of the technological field. The observed coexistence of a relational core-periphery structure with a geographical cluster-pipeline one is discussed in the light of the industrial and geographical dynamics of technological standards.