Offshore outsourcing of administrative and technical services has become a mainstream business practice. Increasing commoditization of business services and growing client experience with outsourcing have created a range of competitive service delivery options for client firms. Yet, data from...

We carry out an analysis of the determinants of location for business services within a region, as opposed to the more usual comparisons among nations or regions. The expected higher concentration patterns at this level can be further biased when one or more urban centers have a disproportionate...

This paper examines the effect on productivity of having more near advertising agency neighbors and hence better opportunities for meetings and exchange within Manhattan. We will show that there is extremely rapid spatial decay in the benefits of having more near neighbors even in the close...

This paper provides a model of knowledge sharing and networking among single unit advertising agencies and investigates the implications of this model in the presence of heterogeneity in agencies’ quality. In a stylized screening model, we show that, under a modest set of assumptions, the...

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering...

A major characteristic of the economic development in European and North America during the past 10-15 years is a fast expansion of the producer-service sector. This paper considers the location dynamics of two categories of firms: contact-intensive producer-service suppliers and other firms,...

R&D service firms are highly innovative knowledge-intensive businesses. They constitute an important component of the knowledge economy, but one that is often in the shadow of the role normally attributed to universities and other public research organisations in the growth of high tech clusters...

The concept of open innovation captures the increasing propensity of firms to work across their traditional boundaries of operation. This phenomenon has largely been studied from the viewpoint of manufacturing businesses while services have received much less attention despite the predominant...

Why do small firms in emerging industries choose to diversify? Theories of strategic management suggest that diversification is driven by search for exogenous market opportunities, deployment of slack resources, or the exploitation of current knowledge. Institutional organization theory suggests...

The knowledge society is characterized by knowledge becoming a kind of commodity that can be traded and priced. Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are representative for such a knowledge-based economy, since their main input and output factor is directly related to knowledge itself....