Measuring Intra-Urban Innovation Space from the Unit-Network Perspective: A Case Study of Guangzhou

Three spatial turns have occurred in innovation research, including focuses on regional, urban, and intra-urban scales. The primary focus of this study was to determine the spatial distribution of innovation and the innovation networks within urban areas based on a unit-network analytical framework. ArcGIS Pro was applied to identify innovation space units and to build a collaboration matrix among these units. Subsequently, Gephi 0.9.2 was used to analyse the networks. Guangzhou was used as a case study for empirical analysis, and the main conclusions are as follows. Guangzhou contains 53 innovation space units covering 495 grids and an area of 123.75 km2 (1.67% of the land area). The 53 innovation space units encompass 231,698 patents, accounting for 72.28% of the total patents in Guangzhou. The 53 innovation space units can be categorised into three levels—innovation agglomeration zones (IAZs), innovation agglomeration sub-zones (IASZs), and innovation agglomeration nodes (IANs)—which can be further classified into nine types. The spatial distribution of innovation and the innovation networks in Guangzhou form a core–periphery structure, with the Wushan–Shipai Science and Education Innovation Zone, Tianhe Centre–Yuexiu East CBD Zone, and Guangzhou Science Town Innovation Zone forming three poles at the core. The weighted degree centrality of the three poles ranked among the top 3 of the 53 innovation space units, and the link frequency between poles was among the top 3 in the 143 pairs of connections between the 53 innovation spatial units.