Start-ups, knowledge acquisition and knowledge exploitation: does proximity really matter?

This paper attempts to investigate the interplay of local and global forces with respect to the processes of knowledge acquisition and exploitation by the start-ups localised inside an industrial cluster. 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, considering their relationships with main customers, localised both inside and outside the cluster. Our results show 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. We suggest the need for a local start-up of business contacts with distant customers localised outside the cluster who become the profitable sources of the start-ups’ knowledge spillovers, confirming the importance of pipeline channels used in such distant interactions. It seems that it is not so much co-location that is important as belonging to a network in which both local start-ups and their customers are widely interactive. 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.