The impact of KIBS’ location on their innovation behaviour

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are widely perceived as being important drivers of technological progress and innovation. They generally depend on knowledge exchanges and, therefore, geographical proximity to markets, customers and suppliers would be expected to be a critical factor in their performance. This paper investigates how the innovation performance of German KIBS firms is related to their distance and size from the nearest city. The analysis largely conforms to a textbook type of spatial urban hierarchy and, indeed, finds that there are very strong distance-decay and city size effects, and these also vary according to the innovation type.