Innovation Performance of Cities: Does Size Matter?

Innovation performance of a city is a very complex phenomenon, where a lot of things should be taken into account. Apart from aspects already familiar for STI scholars, we should have a clear understanding, how innovation is created in different communities and how cities work as human settlements. This requires some knowledge of urban studies and sociology. What is more, to analyze regional innovation systems we should deeply understand some local specifics: culture, history, and geography, which are very important if we try to analyze development trajectories. The role of cities is exponentially increasing with globalization. This master’s thesis tries to reconsider what is an innovation ecosystem in a city, what are the factors that either hamper or foster development of innovation: population number, city districts structure, commuting patterns, values of city residents, etc. By using k-means cluster analysis and calculation of innovation performance of cities (based on the theoretical background), the paper comes to the conclusion, that smaller cities (provided they have a minimum viable amount of human capital) tend to be the most promising areas for innovation. However, due to some limitations (lack of qualitative data and sample biased towards world capitals), it is very difficult to come to the most accurate results about the interdependence between city population and innovation performance.