https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5747-6788
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Abstract
This article examines how regions develop new innovation specializations, covering different activities in the whole process from technological invention to commercialization. We develop a conceptual framework anchored in two building blocks: first, the conceptualization of innovation as a process spanning technology, design, and market activities; second, the application and extension of the principle of relatedness to understand developments within and between the different innovation activities. We offer an empirical investigation where we operationalize the different innovation activities using three intellectual property rights: patents, industrial designs, and trademarks. We provide two separate analyses of how relatedness and cross-relatedness matter for the emergence of new specializations: for 259 NUTS-2 European regions and for 363 metropolitan statistical areas of the US. While relatedness is significantly associated with new regional specializations for all three innovation activities, cross-relatedness between activities also plays a significant role. Our study has important policy implications for developing and monitoring smart specialization regional strategies.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Jim Murphy for his sharp and constructive editorial guidance. We are also grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewers, which helped us strengthen our paper.
Notes
2 For Bulgaria, Ireland, and Romania, we could not locate the postal code for approximately 50 percent of the trademark filings from the database. For Lithuania, while we could locate a postal code for the trademark application data, we could only obtain a three-digit postal code. However, from the European Commission’s NUTS-2 postal codes concordance, we could only locate a five-digit postal code, thereby excluding this country due to the lack of clear concordance.
3 Office of the Chief Economist, https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/research-datasets. For a thorough overview of this trademark database, see Graham et al. (Citation2013).
4 Lee and Rodríguez-Pose (Citation2013) focused on MSAs and NUTS-1 regions when comparing US and European regions. However, wherever data availability allowed them to use NUT-2 regions, they performed the analysis at that level.
5 These high-technology product Nice classes are 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9–15.
6 We did not pursue a similar robustness for design rights. Design patents in the USPTO data simply did not include any secondary Locarno class, while the EUIPO data only included it for 3.5 percent of the filings. Therefore, focusing on the first-listed Locarno class is the only option for the overwhelming majority of the data.