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The environment of a port city can shape the technological behavior of port-vicinity enterprise and then can influence their innovation performance. Conversely, the technological change of port-vicinity enterprise can determine the transformation and upgrade toward diversification of the port city. The limitation of the current research is that it could not be refined to port enterprises from the regional or industrial level and could not fit the dynamic trajectory of technological change of port-vicinity enterprises. Benefiting from the "evolutionary turn" of economic geography in recent years, the target of evolutionary economic geography, which fuses temporal and spatial factors, is to understand the historical process of economic evolution; hence, evolutionary economic geography is the appropriate platform to analyze this topic. This study integrates the main perspectives of evolutionary economic geography, including generalized Darwinism, complexity theory, and path dependence, to explain the behavior characteristics of port-vicinity enterprises such as technology search and selection, path locking, and so on. An evolutionary analysis framework was constructed for the technological change mechanism of port-vicinity enterprises and demonstrated the applicability and value space of evolutionary economic geography on this theme. The findings conclude the following: 1)Observed from the perspective of generalized Darwinism, the heterogenous port-vicinity enterprises have different technology selection mechanisms in market competition, and the technological change is similar to the biological population evolution. The entry and exit of enterprises and technology reset of existing enterprises contribute jointly to the spatiotemporal evolution of port-vicinity enterprises' technology. 2)Under the premise of bounded rationality, the technological change of port-vicinity enterprise was conducted by local search, the preferable innovation performance could be achieved on the certain position between cognitive proximity and distance. For complex technology networks and different technology paths, port-vicinity enterprises need to adapt and make constant trade-offs to promote the diversified technological path of the port city. With the gradual progress of the port life cycle, the type of distribution and technical level of port-vicinity enterprises will change greatly, leading to the unbalanced development of port cities. (3) The path dependence of port-vicinity enterprises' technological change is a series of temporary equilibrium. The evolution of the technological path of such enterprises can be divided into four stages and face three obstacles (functional, cognitive, and institutional locking). The embeddedness of technological change of port-vicinity enterprises leads to spatial dependence. The windows of locational opportunity of emerging industries will be mainly grasped by port cities with greater inclusiveness and diversity. Past port activities may have strengthened the dependence on heavy chemical industry, locking port cities in the low technology path; therefore, the formation of a new technological path needs the combined action of internal and external forces. |
