Knowledge Intensive Services' Suppliers and Clients

27
Tomlinson has gone on to show the impact of KIBS on sectoral performance on
other economies, including developing ones. These lines of research are extremely
interesting, and D Enterprise is funding a study in 2003 which will seek to push
forward such research for a wider range of EU countries, using more detailed data.
However, the limits of the data and the statistical analytic methods mean that such
approaches need to be complemented, at least, by other methods. They can play an
important role in convincing sceptics of the role of KIBS and the variations that this
displays over countries and time, as worthy topics for scholarly and policy concern.
But IO data restrict us to the sectoral level, and arguably the relations between
KIBS and their clients portrayed here are products of factors that remain hard to
explore at this level – functional and structural differences in indus6tries associated
with their core production processes, their size structure, and so on.
2.2 Geography
Geographers have been some of the earliest analysts of the growth of KIBS. Their
approach often reflects concerns with the contribution of KIBS (or producer
services more generally) to regional economies – fuelled in part by worries that
more peripheral regions might be missing out on the benefits of KIBS (since these
tend to be located round core metropolitan areas). There were many case studies of
business services’ role in regional development associated with the EC’s FAST
programme in the 1980s, for instance, and a long stream of studies addresses the
subject from a variety of approaches. For example, Hansen (1994) indicates that
the growth performance of the economies of US cities is related to the size of the
KIBS sectors in these economies.
Other work examines the challenges posed by the growing importance of KIBS,
with the regional perspective leading to a concern with the implications of this for
more peripheral regions. Are they disadvantaged by relative lack of access to the
knowledge possessed by KIBS? The European Commission’s KISINN project
(1998) argued that the problems of some sectors, or small and medium sized
enterprises (SMEs), and regional development may be intensified by the strong
polarisation of access to KIBS. It stressed that KIBS can be sources of knowledge
as to international best practice and the experiences (and markets) of other regions,
and that such knowledge is extremely strategic. Wood (1998) further notes that
consultancy markets remain localised in the EU: over two thirds of clients use
consultancy offices in their local region, and well over 90% in their home countries.
Clients may require knowledge and experience of national and international
technical and management standards and practice; but they also require a `local’
presence to work closely with them (he also notes a dynamic applying to KIBS