How does Accessibility to Knowledge Sources affect the Innovativeness of Corporations? - Evidence from Sweden

The paper studies innovative performance of 130 Swedish corporations for 1993-94, using number of patents per corporation as a function of internal and external knowledge sources to the corporation. A coherent way of handling accessibility measures, within and between corporations located across regions is introduced. We examine the relative importance of intra- and interregional knowledge sources from (i) the own corporation, (ii) other corporations, and (iii) universities. The results show that there is a positive relationship between the innovativeness of a corporation and its accessibility to university researchers within regions where they have research. Having good accessibility between the corporation’s research units does not have any significant effects on the production of patents. Instead the size of the R&D staff of the corporation seems to be the most internal factor. There is no visible indication that accessibility to other corporations’ research is important for innovativeness. This suggests that knowledge flows, between firms belonging to different corporations are limited.