Innovation in Amsterdam, London, Milan, Paris and Stuttgart, 1999-2000

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The theoretical aim of this research is to examine and understand why innovative and competitive firms tend to cluster in a limited number of particular cities. The project is also seeking to understand the observed variety of supplier and customer arrangements among firms and the interactions between these and the firms' home city regions. These concerns raise questions about the characteristics of different stages of the innovation process and why firms' activities have been seen to vary from flexibly specialised local production networks, in mainly craft-based older industries, in new industrial districts; to individually produced innovations linked primarily in the context of competitive secrecy to major international customers. Research on the London region (further London data are also held separately in the companion study to this one, SN:4360 'Innovation in the London Region, 1999-2000') was informed by the comparative perspective of innovation studies in the four European cities of Amsterdam, Milan, Paris and Stuttgart. A common questionnaire was administered in the five cities to a common sample frame of innovative companies who had won awards for basic research in industrial technologies for Europe (BRITE). In addition to this common sample frame, innovative firms drawn from local databases were also interviewed. The lessons from this first stage of the research were taken forward into a more in-depth research study of innovative and external support systems in the London metropolitan region where the sampling frame was identified using a variety of innovation awards. The purpose of gathering data for the five European cities in one study was to implement a common methodology for five of the most innovative regions in Europe. The regions were selected from a group of ten cities identified by the European Union as the ten most significant islands of innovation within the EU. Data were collected from 160 telephone interviews with industrial firms who were asked about specific innovative projects - an average of 32 firms from each city.Main Topics:The dataset includes comparative data from five European cities on the relationship between innovation and external support systems. The questionnaire was developed in London in consultation with the four other European research teams, and was then translated into the four European languages as appropriate. The interviews were administered in the respective cities, and interviewees were asked to consider innovation as a development process, characterise its attributes and then estimate the importance of different external support factors and relationships during its development. The innovations were identified from lists of BRITE award-winning projects. BRITE is an EU award to fund pre-competitive collaborative and cooperative research projects in materials, design and manufacturing technologies. It is therefore a comparable way of identifying innovative firms across the five cities (including London - see SN:4360). Where the number of BRITE firms was insufficient for comparison, they were supplemented from existing databases of innovative firms within the respective city regions. These respondents were asked to answer the questions with respect to their most recent innovation