Co-location of innovators and final products: case of wind energy of Germany

This study highlights the importance of understanding the geographical context of innovation processes in industries driven by tacit knowledge, with German wind energy as its object of investigation. The subject of the research is the spatial organization of innovation processes in the wind energy sector, focusing on the co-location of inventors, production facilities, and installed capacities, particularly among locally embedded enterprises. The aim of this research is to characterize the geography of innovation in the German wind energy sector by examining the correlation between innovation departments and installed capacities, the degree of company embeddedness, and the industry’s stage of development. The novelty lies in the application of a spatial analysis framework combined with network theory to explore how proximity and embeddedness shape the innovation cycle. The study developed a methodology to quantitatively assess the co-location of company branches and installed capacities over time using influence zones. Findings reveal a strong link between the locations of knowledge-generation sites and installed capacities, especially for embedded enterprises, where co-location coefficients within a 50-km radius range from 1.9 to 2.5. This correlation strengthens over time, particularly from 2000–2009 to 2010–2019. Foreign enterprises show high co-location coefficients for manufacturing sites but not for innovation departments. Further research is needed to explore the interplay of tacit and formalized knowledge in increasingly complex innovation processes and to determine causality in co-location patterns between innovators and installed capacities.