Sectoral Distribution of Inventive Activity and Specialization Patterns — Towards an Identification of Switzerland’s Main Inventive Clusters

As pointed out in the previous chapter, inventive activity is unevenly distributed across the Swiss territory and this unevenness is even more obvious at the level of small geographical units of analysis. Despite the unequal levels of inventive performance between regions, a certain concentration of inventive activity has been observed in the western and north-eastern parts of Switzerland. The goal of this section is to go one step further and to investigate in more detail the specialization patterns of inventive activity in Switzerland by conducting sectoral-level analyzes and identifying the country’s main inventive clusters.1 As argued in the second part of this dissertation, economic and innovative activities linked by commonalities and complementarities tend to concentrate in certain geographical areas and to form what has been called in the literature clusters or regional innovation systems (i.a. Marshall, 1890/1916; Porter, 1990, 1998a; Krugman, 1991a, b; Nelson, 1993; Freeman, 1995; Cooke, 1998). Despite the widening of the world economy, these “evolutionary phenomena of economic geography” are still a crucial source of innovation, productivity growth, and competitiveness as they give access to precious location-bound assets (such as tacit knowledge) that cannot be easily transferred across locations or accessed from a foreign location.