Mapping the position of cities in corporate research and development through a gravity model-based bidimensional regression analysis

In her seminal work entitled ‘The Global City’, Saskia Sassen (1991) specified New York, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris as leading examples of global cities. Furthermore, she defined the most important characteristics of global cities (Sassen 2001: 4), one of which is that global cities are major sites of production of innovation. Since Sassen’s global city notion was first introduced, significant changes have occurred in the world economy, which can be characterised by, for example, the massive economic growth of developing countries, especially that of China, and rapid technological changes due to fast-growing industries such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology (Nicolini and Nozza 2008; Dernis et al. 2015; Csomós and Tóth 2016a). As a result of these developments, global cities have been continuously losing their privileged position as major sites of production of innovation, and new competitors have emerged in developing countries, even in the home countries of the global cities.