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Knowledge Clusters And Knowledge Hubs: Designing Epistemic Landscapes For Development, Hans-Dieter Evers, Solvay Gerke, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose – With globalization and knowledge-based production, firms may cooperate on a global scale, outsource parts of their administrative or productive units and negate location altogether. The extremely low transaction costs of data, information and knowledge seem to invalidate the theory of agglomeration and the spatial clustering of firms, going back to the classical work by Alfred Weber and Alfred Marshall, who emphasized the microeconomic benefits of industrial collocation. This paper aims to argue against this view and show why the growth of knowledge societies will rather increase than decrease the relevance of location by creating knowledge clusters and knowledge …