Exploring the position of cities in global corporate research and development: a bibliometric analysis by two different geographical approaches

TL;DR

This study uses bibliometric analysis to examine how global cities serve as command centers and innovation hubs for corporate R&D, revealing their roles through two geographical approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a dual approach to analyze global cities' roles in corporate R&D using bibliometric data from Scopus and Forbes 2000 databases.

Findings

Identifies key cities as control points of R&D activities

Reveals differences between cities' roles as home and host locations

Provides insights into global city functions in corporate innovation

Abstract

Global cities are defined, on the one hand, as the major command and control centres of the world economy and, on the other hand, as the most significant sites of the production of innovation. As command and control centres, they are home to the headquarters of the most powerful MNCs of the global economy, while as sites for the production of innovation they are supposed to be the most important sites of corporate research and development (R&D) activities. In this paper, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of the data located in the Scopus and Forbes 2000 databases to reveal the correlation between the characteristics of the above global city definitions. We explore which cities are the major control points of the global corporate R&D (home city approach), and which cities are the most important sites of corporate R&D activities (host city approach). According to the home city approach we assign articles produced by companies to cities where the decision-making headquarters are located (i.e. to cities that control the companies' R&D activities), while according to the host city approach we assign articles to cities where the R&D activities are actually conducted. Given Sassen's global city concept, we expect global cities to be both the leading home cities and host cities.