Abstract

One way of mapping twenty-first-century capitalism is to focus on the knowledge economy (Stiglitz and Greenwald, 2014). Since knowledge has value when it is ‘sticky’, economists and geographers have sought to understand the evolution of the economic landscape by reference to the spatial differentiation and concentration of knowledge. So, for example, it is arguable that Silicon Valley was made and is reproduced time and again by agents and organizations seeking to take advantage of their proximity to local knowledge. At one level, knowledge can be prosaic or sophisticated: it is often difficult, if not impossible, to separate one from the other. At another level, knowledge is both a stock and a flow. If knowledge can be commodified and sold, being close to centres of innovation is likely to be less important than the process of making knowledge at the interface between experience, organizations, and markets (see Clark (2018), on the governance and regulation of financial management).