The Geography of Swedish ICT Innovation

Abstract: Innovation has in recent years been getting an increasingly important role in both industrial policy and in the academic discourse. In both the United States and the European Union policy-makers have tried to kick start slumbering economies by launching new innovation policies and academics write about innovation like never before. In this environment, Sweden has become something of a role model and is often mentioned in rankings of the world’s most innovative countries. A number of successful startups in Stockholm have led to a lot of attention being paid to the ICT sector and parallels are often drawn to California’s Silicon Valley. Simultaneously, a development toward increased focus on the importance of geography to innovative activities within both policy and research can be discerned. Through quantitative analysis of newly-presented data, this thesis exposes the changing geographical patterns of Swedish ICT innovation during four decades. The findings suggest that the Stockholm dominance was in fact more significant in the 1970s and 1980s than in the 2000s, and that the development of the spatial concentration of innovation output has gone from decreasing in the 1970s and 1980s to increasing in the 1990s and early 2000s.