Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
During the last years, we have witnessed the rise of knowledge-based economy as main driver of global and local economic development ([54] Yigitcanlar, 2009). [7] Carrillo (2006) has identified the twenty-first century as the "century of Knowledge Cities (KCs)" since urban regions and KCs have become centers of knowledge generation, knowledge-based economy and knowledge-based development (KBD). In the context of the new knowledge area, concepts of knowledge, innovation and creativity have become primary factors of production and development ([16] Durmaz et al. , 2008). In this context, "knowledge-based urban development" has gained popularity as a powerful strategy for sustainable economic, social and urban growth, and for the post-industrial development of cities ([55] Yigitcanlar and Velibeyoglu, 2008).
However, the process of planning and implementing KBD approaches is neither quick nor simple. This seems to be already understood by the research community, which the last few years has begun to concentrate its efforts in order to develop appropriate frameworks, methodologies, tools, systems, metrics etc, so as to evolve the whole KBD field. In this respect, there are currently many research efforts as well practical approaches which are in progress and, consequently, create many pending issues to be addressed in relation to the KBD field. This paper attempts to present an agenda for future research, by co-instantaneously presenting the status in relation to the major pending issues of KBD, that will be in the centre of interest during the new decade of 2010-2020. This is accomplished through a wide-scope literature review and qualitative scoring of KBD categories. The discussion presented on these issues should be of great value not only to researchers and practitioners but also to cities and countries willing to design efficient and effective KBD strategies.
Section 2 presents the current status regarding four major fields of KBD, as well as the most important future research streams, based on literature review. In section 3, a synthesis of results is presented based on three criteria: existing research volume, existing research maturity, and research difficulty. Finally, section 4 discusses the main conclusions.
2. KBD research agenda
Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] illustrates the major streams of KBD research, based on a comprehensive review of the literature related to KBD. The main goal of this...