Knowledge Intensive Services' Suppliers and Clients

13
arrangements for clients. New S&T-related KIBS may emerge from professional
services: for example, it is common to find firms emerging to supply software and
other products to clients and/or other firms in their sector.) The staff profile of
KIBS includes many people with higher education and professional qualifications.
This is one indicator that we are dealing with a specialised KIBS, rather than a
service concerned with routine solutions to common problems – such as transport
and logistics, mass entertainment, postal and telecommunications infrastructure
services (much of what such services do is not routine – but a large share of the
effort of their workforce is being expended in routine ways). 2
Evidence as to the knowledge-intensity of different economic activities can be
gleaned from various sources, and Figure 1, below, uses the results from the most
recent UK Community Innovation Survey (CIS-3). This allows us to examine the
share of graduates of two kinds – Science, Engineering and Technology graduates,
and other graduates – in the workforce of firms responding to the survey. The data
have been processed by Bruce Tether, of CRIC. They confirm that KIBS are more
knowledge-intensive than other sectors (by this indicator) and suggest that there are
clusters of KIBS relying (a) mainly on “other graduates” and (b) also on S&T
graduates. This corresponds to a familiar distinction in the KIBS literature, between
technology-oriented and more professional and administrative KIBS.
2 A potentially interesting line of enquiry is to examine the hare of R&D or other innovation-related
staff among the senior echelons of such companies, rather than as a proportion of the total workforce.
This might help us distinguish those companies that are innovative and deploying new knowledge in
strategic ways, as opposed to those that are simply big.