Systemic approach to knowledge localization

The paper aims to provide theoretical and practical substantiation for a comprehensive study of the processes of creation, exchange and dissemination of knowledge at the city level under the general concept of knowledge localization. To achieve the goal, we solved the following tasks: G.B. Kleiner’s system tetrad was applied to characterize knowledge localization as an economic system, structural elements of the tetrad were quantitatively estimated based on in-depth analysis of patent data, and the developed approach was used to analyze the knowledge localization system cyclicality at the level of cities of different sizes. The most important results of the paper that determine its scientific novelty include the following: 1) the spatial and temporal boundaries of the object, process, environmental and project subsystems of knowledge localization are differentiated depending on the scale of the organization and the city, the research duration and the technology life cycle; 2) a three-element structure of the object subsystem is substantiated: an independent researcher, a research group and a research network; 3) within the process subsystem, knowledge exchange is interpreted through the duration of continuous growth of research groups by dividing them into groups “without growth ” and “with growth”, and their quantitative characteristics are obtained for cities of different sizes; 4) within the framework of the analysis of the non-stationarity of the knowledge localization system, it was established that the cyclicality of the emergence of research groups in medium, large and largest cities is closer to the cycles of technology development in China, in a small city - to global fluctuations. The results obtained allow identifying promising areas for the development or renewal of knowledge accumulation in cities of different sizes.