Grzegorz Micek

Based on an analysis of personnel flows (managerial and employee ), the authors show that knowledge flows in the biotech sector in Poland are strongly concentrated in space. With respect to managerial intra-metropolitan flows, Warszawa has a similar position to Cracow and the Tri-City (Gdańsk – Gdynia – Sopot conurbation ). Cracow is characterised by strong isolation with respect to personnel flows from the outside. On the other hand, within the scope of inter-metropolitan flows, Poland’s capital is dominant, in particular in terms of flows to the Tri-city, Poznań and Łódź. In the case of employee flows, the most important features of the examined issue are: dominance of intra-metropolitan flows and strong relationship between flows and the headquarters of the largest biotechnological companies. The conducted studies have shown that in the context of the Polish biotech sector, the concept of “local buzz, global pipelines” is corroborated, in line with which local and global knowledge flows are complementary with respect to each other.

Research on the spatial distribution of high technology industries has been the subject of geographers’ studies for a long time. However, in recent years there has been a lack of analyses in Poland which would allow to determine the spatio-temporal variability of advanced economic activities and to verify the determinants of their occurrence. On the basis of GUS data and variables describing transport accessibility, principal component and regression analyses were carried out to identify the location factors of the high-tech industry at the local (commune) level. It is still significantly concentrated in the areas of large cities. Nevertheless, the number of enterprises of the analysed industries in suburban areas increases significantly, which indicates the processes of economic suburbanisation of advanced economic activities. Unfortunately, apart from historically shaped centre of the high technology industry and limited number of new centres, the analysed industries do not develop in medium and small towns and their surroundings. Due to strong emigration, underdeveloped human capital and insufficient transport accessibility, high technology industries have so far generally not appeared in non-metropolitan areas, too. The analysed high-tech industries are concentrated in areas with high values of the entrepreneurship index, high living standards and relatively good transport accessibility. The key variable determining the development of the analysed industries is the situation on the labour market, both in terms of the level of professional activity of the population, the sought-after qualifications of the staff, as well as the level of inter-firm mobility of the staff.