Digital transformation in the world city networks’ advanced producer services complex: A technology space analysis

Francisco Trincado-Munoz; Michiel van Meeteren; Tzameret H. Rubin; Tim Vorley

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103721

Digital transformation in the world city networks’ advanced producer services complex: A technology space analysis

Francisco Trincado-Munoz, Michiel van Meeteren^*, Tzameret H. Rubin, Tim Vorley

^*Corresponding author for this work

Geography and Education

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

The Advanced Producer Services (APS) sector, long considered to be the vanguard of the knowledge economy and world-city formation, is undergoing a digital transformation. Digital transformation entails an increased engagement with digital technologies in the operation, product offerings and strategies of APS firms, with potentially transformative implications. Such digitization processes are well established in the morphing of finance into FinTech, with the other APS sub-sectors now allegedly catching-up as evidenced by the arrival of LegalTech, AccountTech, RegTech, PropTech, and AdTech. Moreover, the digital transformation could imply that
Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) services are again becoming central to the APS complex after two decades of being largely omitted from world city research. Adopting an evolutionary economic geography perspective, we introduce a new approach that utilizes near real-time data sources to compare local technology spaces with the global picture of digital transformation in world cities. Building a dataset containing information from 40,754 APS start-ups and scale-ups derived from Dealroom.co, this paper explores the geographically uneven digital transformation of the APS sector across European and North American world cities. This allows gauging the extent of digital transformation within APS sectors for each selected city, develop
new understandings of the division of labour between world cities, and highlight where sector coalescence between APS sectors is occurring and is more likely to occur. In the process we develop new technological indicators of world-cityness that can be used alongside the classic world city connectivity indicators.

Original language	English
Article number	103721
Journal	Geoforum
Volume	151
Early online date	21 Feb 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103721
Publication status	Published - 2024

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University's monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments.

Funding Information:
This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University’s monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s)

Funding

This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University's monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments. This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University’s monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments.

Funders	Funder number
Economic and Social Research Council	ES/S010416/1, ES/S010475/1
Economic and Social Research Council
Universiteit Utrecht

Keywords

Advanced Producer Services
Digital transformation
Near real-time data
Technology space analysis
World cities

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10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103721Licence: CC BY

1-s2.0-S0016718523000477-mainFinal published version, 3.09 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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title = "Digital transformation in the world city networks{\textquoteright} advanced producer services complex: A technology space analysis",

abstract = "The Advanced Producer Services (APS) sector, long considered to be the vanguard of the knowledge economy and world-city formation, is undergoing a digital transformation. Digital transformation entails an increased engagement with digital technologies in the operation, product offerings and strategies of APS firms, with potentially transformative implications. Such digitization processes are well established in the morphing of finance into FinTech, with the other APS sub-sectors now allegedly catching-up as evidenced by the arrival of LegalTech, AccountTech, RegTech, PropTech, and AdTech. Moreover, the digital transformation could imply that Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) services are again becoming central to the APS complex after two decades of being largely omitted from world city research. Adopting an evolutionary economic geography perspective, we introduce a new approach that utilizes near real-time data sources to compare local technology spaces with the global picture of digital transformation in world cities. Building a dataset containing information from 40,754 APS start-ups and scale-ups derived from Dealroom.co, this paper explores the geographically uneven digital transformation of the APS sector across European and North American world cities. This allows gauging the extent of digital transformation within APS sectors for each selected city, develop new understandings of the division of labour between world cities, and highlight where sector coalescence between APS sectors is occurring and is more likely to occur. In the process we develop new technological indicators of world-cityness that can be used alongside the classic world city connectivity indicators.",

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author = "Francisco Trincado-Munoz and \{van Meeteren\}, Michiel and Rubin, \{Tzameret H.\} and Tim Vorley",

note = "Funding Information: This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University's monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments. Funding Information: This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University{\textquoteright}s monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 The Author(s)",

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AU - Vorley, Tim

N1 - Funding Information: This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University's monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments. Funding Information: This paper was funded through the following Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants (UK): Innovating Next Generation Services Through Collaborative Design (Project ES/S010475/1) and Technology Driven Next Generation Insurance (TECHNGI) (Project ES/S010416/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2022 GeoInno conference in Milan and at Utrecht University’s monthly EconGeo Seminar (October 2022). The authors would like to thank Karen Lai, David Bassens, Reijer Hendrikse, Judith Verweijen, and the anonymous reviewer team for their generous comments. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s)

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Digital transformation in the world city networks’ advanced producer services complex: A technology space analysis

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Bibliographical note

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Keywords

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