The Knowledge-Base of the Stuttgart Automobile Industry and Its Outreach

In this chapter we study the diffusion of automotive knowledge created in the Region of Stuttgart. Patents leave a paper trail in the form of citations that we analyze in order to show which regions learn from e-mobility and fuel cell knowledge created in the region of Stuttgart. We show that citations of the patents of both technologies tend to localize in Germany, Japan and the US. However, in case of e-mobility, while aggregating the countries by groups, the largest number of citations is made by European, more precisely Western European countries. The fact, that domestic knowledge flows in fuel cell technology are not the most intensive can be explained by the early stage of the technology and that there is no hard fundament, on which the new knowledge can be built.