Inter-organizational geographical proximity and local start-ups’ knowledge acquisition: a dynamic approach

In this paper, we analyse this debate concerning the importance of local or global relationships for the processes of both knowledge acquisition by local start-ups from their customers (Porter, 2000) and of the exploitation of this knowledge to reinforce the start-up’s innovation activity. In particular, we empirically intend to determine if start-ups localised inside an industrial cluster are more likely to acquire and exploit significant levels of knowledge from their co-localised customers than from globally localised and dispersed customers, considering several potential explicative factors. The hypotheses are tested with face-to-face survey data from 56 high-tech start-ups localised in a metropolitan cluster in the city of Rome (the so-called Tiburtina Valley), considering their relationships with main customers, localised both inside and outside the cluster. Our results are in opposition to the traditional hypotheses concerning the positive link between proximity and knowledge diffusion, showing a negative and very significant influence of proximity between the local start-ups and their customers on both knowledge acquisition and knowledge exploitation by a local start-up. Moreover, these results put in evidence that a lot of other factors seem to have a strong influence on processes of both knowledge acquisition and exploitation by these local start-ups, encouraging further analysis of these processes inside an industrial cluster.