Staff News - Marcus Spiller awarded PhD
Marcus Spiller, a founding Director of SGS, has been awarded a PhD in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University in Melbourne.
Marcus's thesis investigated "How Advanced Business Services drive the creation and adoption of new ideas in contemporary economies. The power of these Services to catalyse innovation was shown to depend on trust based relationships and social interaction. Advanced Business Services therefore work best with proximate clients. These findings point to the potential for a ‘core and periphery’ pattern of economic development to emerge across Australia, caused by the growing concentration of knowledge based services into Sydney and Melbourne".
The thesis drew on a wide body of literature and included three research streams; a random sample survey of more than 100 Advanced Business Service firms in Melbourne, regression analysis relating manufacturing worker incomes (a proxy for innovation) to distance from key centres for these Services and a dozen in-depth case studies of the innovation experiences of firms in Bendigo and Melbourne.