Mapping regional and sectoral characteristics of knowledge-intensive business services: Evidence from the Province of Quebec (Canada)

The study presents original evidence on the characteristic features and innovation activities of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Based on a wide-scale survey of 1,124 KIBS firms in Quebec (Canada), we explore empirically the extent to which KIBS from various sectors and regions differ in their characteristics and their uses of innovation practices. The results from the sectoral analysis reveal that KIBS display different characteristic features and innovation behaviours across sectors, thus suggesting that inter-sectoral differences are important when explaining innovation activities in KIBS. The comparison between KIBS in large, medium, central, and resource regions shows that the characteristic features and the innovativeness of KIBS are rather similar, and little or no significant statistical differences were found between the different regions in the province of Quebec. Thus, overall, the results of our study seem to suggest that a location does not te nd to make a difference in respect to characteristic features and innovation performance of KIBS.