Listening to the buzz: Exploring the link between firm creation and regional innovative atmosphere as reflected by social media

This paper presents a novel approach to capture ‘buzz’, the vibrancy and knowledge exchange propensity of localised informal communication flows. Building on a conceptual framework based on relational economic geography, we argue the content of buzz may allow to probe into the character of places and investigate what is ‘in the air’ within regional entrepreneurial milieux. In particular, we analyse big data to listen for the presence of buzz about innovation – defined by discursive practices that reflect an innovative atmosphere – and explore how this may influence regional firm creation. Using information from 180 million geolocated Tweets comprising almost two billion words across NUTS3 regions in the UK for the year 2014, our results offer novel evidence, robust to different model specifications, that regions characterised by a relatively higher intensity of discussion and vibrancy around topics related to innovation may provide a more effective set of informal resources for sharing and recombination of ideas, defining regional capabilities to support and facilitate entrepreneurial processes. The findings contribute to the literature on the intangible dimensions in the geography of innovation and offer new insights on the potential of natural language processing for economic geography research.

The Secrets and Future of Global Cities A Book Review and Reflections on “Global City Makers”, Economic Actors and Practices in the World City Network – by Michael Hoyler, Christof Parnreiter and Allan Watson, Elgar 2018

The rapid increase of global cities in the 1990s would count now to reach more than 100 cities. Many of these global cities are trying to influence the global economy by differentiated or similar advanced instruments. The capacities and the details of these instruments have not been scientifically investigated in detail, despite the delicate role of the global cities makers and their capacity to influence the socio-economies as powerful economic actors. These intermediary economic actors are very influential in the making and un-making global cities. The “Global City Makers” economic actors and practices in the world city network by Hoyler et. al. (2018) is been reviewed from this perspective mainly. As this book help to identify the influence of certain economic planning on the socio-economic fate of millions of peoples today. Engaging critically and constructively with global urban studies from a relational economic geography perspective, the book outlines a renewed agenda for global cities research.

Openness values and regional innovation: a set-analysis

Statistical studies evidence that openness values matter for regional innovation but not how they matter. A qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) study of 108 North–West European regions identifies four cross-case mechanisms that explain regional innovation: the diversity, cosmopolitan environment, technology transfer and creativity mechanisms. Only in technology transfer do openness values not play a role. This evidences that openness values connect diverse local and non-local social spaces to local and non-local physical places to unlock a larger potential for more dynamic innovation. QCA understands causality as configurational and identifies mechanisms rather than net effects, which answers how-questions better than statistical methods do. The focus on mechanisms highlights how innovation connects interactions between agents in social space to physical place, which makes an empirical contribution to the relational economic geography literature.

Policy Mobility

This chapter teases out some of the economic implications of the economy in between cities and nations associated with policy mobility. The subject of policy mobility is one that signals a relational economic geography. It embodies the tension between the fixity and mobility of capital, between sedentarist and nomadic perspectives in geography. Yet it cannot be reduced to one or other in these sets of antimonies. The chapter charts some of the history of policy mobility before noting the importance of the transnational economic actors and interests that drive contemporary policy mobility. It considers the nature of policy mobility in strong and weak forms of inter-urban competition.

Looking beyond place branding: the emergence of place reputation

Purpose As place branding is reaching an impasse in terms of its development with numerous shortcomings being uncovered, this commentary suggests that the practice can be repositioned as part of the more comprehensive notion of place reputation. By building on the idea of corporate reputation and embryonic evidence of its application to geographical entities, this paper aims to argue for a more substantial translation of this concept to cities and regions. Design/methodology/approach This idea was investigated through empirical work in English second-tier cities, specifically concerning semi-structured interviews with local and regional stakeholders on the topic of place reputation conducted in 2014. Findings The empirical work found that place branding and place reputation can remain complimentary to one another, are entwined and are problematic to disentangle. This discovered that place branding is not as effective when used in isolation, and the concept benefits from the support of a more comprehensive reputation management strategy. In addition, this study found that the idea of reputational capital is a key theory for the development of reputation, allowing this broad notion to be tackled in terms of audiences, domains and sectors. Originality/value Moreover, this commentary constitutes a novel piece of research, and this is achieved by exploring gaps in both interdisciplinary place branding and corporate literatures of reputation being applied to place. This is addressed from a relational economic geography perspective, with the support of reputational capital which has links to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) Forms of Capital, this seeks to raise issues and add value to current place branding debates.