https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9567-6083
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ABSTRACT
This paper provides insights into trademark activity at the regional level via two objectives. First, it examines the relationship between technological capabilities and new trademark applications. Second, it considers whether regions branch out to new trademark specializations that are related to their existing specializations. The paper employs European Union Intellectual Property Office’s (EUIPO) data to study 218 European NUTS-2 regions (16 countries) over the period 2000–16. Results show that increased technological stock is associated with more trademark applications and that existing trademark relatedness induces new specializations. These findings contribute to a better understanding of trademark activity and policies related to regional diversification including Smart Specialisation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks Ioannis Kaplanis and Yannis Psycharis for their suggestions, as well as the conference participants at the Greek Section of the European Regional Science Association. All remaining errors are the author’s own.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For comprehensive reviews, see Schautschick and Greenhalgh (Citation2016) and Castaldi (Citation2020).
2. The EU Innovation Scoreboard has also recently employed trademark counts in the compilation of innovation rankings (European Commission, Citation2015).
3. For literature reviews, see Boschma (Citation2017) and Kogler (Citation2017).
4. A patent needs to satisfy four criteria for patentability, one of which is subject matter (Ouellette, Citation2015). For instance, business method inventions are generally not patentable in most patent offices (Beresford, Citation2000, p. 4).
5. In the European Union (EU), the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) was founded in 1994 with the purpose of accepting and registering, after due examination, trademark applications (Council Regulation (EC) No. 40/94). In 2016, the OHIM changed its name to the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). (https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/open-data).
7. If a trademark claims more than one class, then it is double-counted. The qualitative nature of Figure A1 does not change if trademarks are weighed based on the Nice classes they claim.
9. The EPO does not yet grant patents with EU-wide coverage, but a grant from this office allows applicants to register patents in all EU countries in addition to many non-EU countries, which are members of the EPO (Harhoff et al., Citation2009).
11. All the visualizations of connectivity were made with the help of Grund’s (Citation2015) code.
12. Class 37: Building construction; repair; installation services; and Class 40: Treatment of materials.
13. Embarking from the latter statement, it is useful to note the recent study by Farinha et al. (Citation2019) that dissects the potential different mechanisms of relatedness in new job specializations. According to their study, these mechanisms are (1) complementarity, in the sense that jobs that complement each other are more likely to be related; (2) similarity, signifying that types of jobs may require overlapping skill sets in the spirit of Neffke and Henning (Citation2013); and (3) local synergies. Decomposing trademark relatedness in these three mechanisms is neither straightforward nor within the scope of this study. To what extent each mechanism promotes new trademark specializations can be a timely topic of regional policy, especially when considering that trademark classes may be associated with different technology/information intensity (Mendonça & Fontana, Citation2011), and in view of the findings that they are strongly linked to the region’s technological capabilities.