Matthew Lehnert

Bio: Matthew Lehnert is an academic researcher from University of Toledo. The author has contributed to research in topics: Metropolitan area & Per capita. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 6 publications receiving 43 citations.

Geographic Patterns of Craft Breweries at the Intraurban Scale

Abstract: This article examines the intraurban geography of craft breweries in ten cities across the United States. First, through an exhaustive literature review, we outline both supply- and demand-side factors that might cause craft breweries to cluster. Second, we empirically test whether these establishments tend to cluster within cities using spatial statistical techniques. Many communities are attempting to support the establishment of more craft breweries as a way to boost tourism and economic development. The findings from this article aid in this discussion by providing insights into how craft brewers locate and the factors that could influence their location decision behavior. Our findings suggest that craft brewers do in fact cluster. There are both supply and demand factors responsible. On the supply side, the collaborative environment within the industry and the artisan nature of the industry's products allows for benefits of clustering to outweigh the costs associated with this behavior. On the demand...

Exploring Innovation Gaps in the American Space Economy

Abstract: This chapter explores disparities in urban innovation, in the context of the history of city systems and advanced urban economies. The overall innovative index of metropolitan economies is estimated by first generating its score on each of the latent dimensions and then adding up those performance scores across all of the dimensions. The results produced a clear set of innovation centers, spread evenly across the United States. Not only do these findings square with contemporary theory on agglomeration economies, as explained by Mulligan et al. (Ann Reg Sci 48:405–431, 2012), they line up nicely with older, less behaviorally motivated theories of central place hierarchies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the main challenges facing regional science in the research areas of innovation and urban growth.

Metropolitan Innovation in the New Economy

Abstract: This paper analyzes the high-tech economies of 350-plus metropolitan areas across the US during 2010 Attention is given to 20 different production attributes—including the age and education of the workforce, patent production, business startups, per capita productivity of the workers, and the like Multivariate analysis is used to reduce these 20 attributes down to 10 orthogonal dimensions; then the scores on these dimensions are used to identify eight different innovation and entrepreneurial clubs Basically the exercise deconstructs the metropolitan economies into various parts so that each economy is assigned a signature score on each of the independent factors High-tech places, which are especially active in both patents and startups, are shown to be more heterogeneous than low-tech places Moreover, the recent growth and change seen in many metropolitan areas appears to be associated with the incidence of very different factors: population growth has been driven by forces that are different from those that have induced either employment change or productivity growth in those metropolitan areas

Leveraging Brewing History: The Case of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine Neighborhood

Abstract: The United States is experiencing a craft beer revolution. There are over 7,000 craft breweries in the United States; in 1980 there were only eight. The rise of craft breweries is a response to consumer dissatisfaction with the beer offered by mega-breweries such as Anheuser-Busch. Craft breweries offer consumers a higher quality product and a wide variety of different beer styles. The growing popularity of craft beer has also resulted in a renewed interest in the history of beer and brewing. The focus of this paper is Cincinnati, Ohio. During the nineteenth-century Cincinnati was the destination of tens of thousands of immigrants from Germany. Most of these immigrants settled in what would become known as the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. By the 1870s Over-the-Rhine was one of the most densely populated German-speaking neighborhoods in the western hemisphere—German-speaking churches, German-language schools and newspapers filled the neighborhood. Over-the-Rhine was also home to 13 breweries, which provided the local population with German-style lager beer. During the twentieth century, the number of breweries in the United States declined as a result of a decades-long period of consolidation in the American brewing industry. In Cincinnati, as in other American cities, breweries closed one-by-one as national breweries, like Anheuser-Busch and Pabst, came to dominate the brewing landscape. Old brewery buildings either sat empty of were adaptively re-used for other purposes. Recognizing the historical value of these old brewery buildings, in 2005 residents established the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District Community Urban Redevelopment Corporation (BDCURC), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. The mission of the BDCURC is to “make the Brewery District a healthy, balanced and supportive neighborhood economy by preserving, restoring and redeveloping our unique brewing history and historic urban fabric.” The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Cincinnati’s brewing history is being leveraged as a part of the city’s broader neighborhood redevelopment efforts.

Low-quality Patents in the Eye of the Beholder: Evidence from Multiple Examiners

Abstract: Low-quality patents are of considerable concern to businesses operating in patent-dense markets. There are two pathways by which low-quality patents may be issued: the patent office may apply systematically a standard that is too lenient (low inventive step threshold); or the patent office may grant patents that are, in fact, below its own threshold (so-called ‘weak’ patents). This paper uses novel data from inventions that have been examined at the five largest patent offices and an explicit model of the grant process to derive first-of-their-kind office-specific estimates of the height of the inventive step threshold and the prevalence of weak patents. The empirical analysis is based on patent applications granted at one office but refused at another office. We estimate that the fraction of patent grants associated with a patent standard that is lower than that of other countries ranges from 2-15%, with Japan having the tightest standard and the United States and China the loosest. The fraction of grants that are inconsistent with the office’s own standard ranges from 2-6 per cent. The fraction of grants that are inconsistent in this sense is generally higher in newer fields such as software and biotechnology, and lower in traditional fields such as mechanical engineering. Our estimates of invalidity are much lower than those that have been derived from litigation studies, consistent with litigated patents being highly non-representative of the population.

Suburban (dis)advantage : views of suburban life from low-income immigrants in Surrey, BC

Abstract: ..........................................................................................................................................iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................................. iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................. v Table of

Reframing the Role of Universities in the Development of Regional Innovation Systems

Abstract: The role of universities in regional innovation has evolved over the last 20 years. This evolution has seen the emergence of a third role of universities that has re-shaped and transformed their two traditional functions of teaching and research. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for analysing variation in the roles performed by universities in the development of regional innovation systems. This framework is based on the triple helix model of university, industry, government relations, the literature on university engagement and the innovation systems literature, more generally. The framework is applied to a comparative study of three non core-metropolitan universities in Australia. A number of insights and issues are drawn in regard to conceptualising the role of universities in regional systems.

Small Holds Sway: How Small Businesses Mobilize Knowledge to Support Action in Learning Processes for Sustainability Transformations

Abstract: Narratives are central to the organization and transformation of society due to their ability to maintain stability and promote change. This dual ability is realized by metanarratives as they articulate and reiterate the organizing principles that underpin social arrangements and shape the development of related storylines. Narratives can also be mobilized to justify and legitimize change processes through sensemaking that articulates alternative perspectives and verbalizes new realities into existence. However, previous research has not explicitly examined the reciprocal interdependence of these processes, and a nuanced understanding of how new narratives are constructed by and among organizations is still missing. Responding to this gap, this research empirically explores how small businesses draw on organizing principles for making sense of their attempt to transform industrialized production and consumption systems into more sustainable versions. The examined industry transformations in the brewing sector in Canada and Germany show how metanarratives shape these processes by making tacitly held understandings explicit in language, externalizing alternative organizing principles around ‘the art of making’ and ‘cooperation as a means to prosper.’ The case studies illustrate how studied small businesses creatively draw on these organizing principles to make sense of new action contexts in a way that challenges industrial and competitive industry arrangements; these alternative metanarratives support small businesses to create new meaning categories around ‘aesthetics’ and ‘affective work’ (i.e., creating and managing emotions), and establish a ‘collaborative ethos’ as well as ‘relational identities.’ This research demonstrates that the constructed narratives of change that guide industry transformations toward sustainability do not emerge in a vacuum and that both alternative organizing principles of metanarratives and the sensemaking of actors are mutually dependent.