Regional Branching and Key Enabling Technologies: Evidence from European Patent Data

By Sandro Montresor, F. Quatraro. 2017

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

abstract This article investigates the role of key enabling technologies (KETs) in regional branching. Taking into account the general purpose properties of these technologies, and referring to recombinant innovation theories, we argue that KETs knowledge could attenuate the effect that regional branching ascribes to technological relatedness, giving regions more scope for their technological diversification strategies. Furthermore, we claim that regions could benefit from this KETs effect, even if they are followers in their development, thanks to interregional spillovers from closer KETs leaders. Combining regional patent and economic data from a thirty-year panel (1980–2010) of twenty-six European countries, we actually find that KETs negatively moderate the role of technological relatedness for regional specialization in new technological fields, captured by a revealed technology advantage index. KETs knowledge also increases the number of new technological specializations. This positive effect more than compensates the previous negative moderation effect, so that the net impact of KETs on regional branching is positive. Supportive evidence is also found for KETs cross-regional spillovers. Overall, the results provide scientific support for the recent European Commission recommendation to plug KETs into the policy toolbox for smart specialization strategies inspired by regional branching.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5ff8df0a69540b7ad80bbf9825fad350dea46c0

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Citations in the corpus

Smart specialization policy in the European Union: relatedness, knowledge complexity and regional diversification (2019, background): “Moreover, our framework focuses primarily on the supply side, and less so on the demand side (such as internal or external demand, and market access), at least not explicitly (Montresor & Quatraro, 2017; Tanner, 2014).”
Green technologies and Smart Specialisation Strategies: a European patent-based analysis of the intertwining of technological relatedness and key enabling technologies (2018, background): “…industrial structure, which are cognitively related to them: an hypothesis that has found ample empirical confirmation (e.g. Koegler et al., 2013; Rigby, 2013; Boschma et al., 2014; Tanner, 2014; Colombelli et al., 2014; Boschma et al., 2015; Castaldi et al., 2015; Montresor and Quatraro, 2017).”
Industrial Diversification in Europe: The Differentiated Role of Relatedness (2018, background): “This correlates with the argument that certain knowledge and technology are in themselves less tied to a specific industry domain (Montresor and Quatraro 2017).1 Core regions with stronger knowledge resources could then be claimed to be in a better position to develop generic knowledge and…”