Enhancing the inventive capacity of European regions through interregional collaboration

ABSTRACT

Interregional technological collaboration stands as a pivotal policy tool within the European strategy aimed at fortifying smart and sustainable regional growth. Implicit within this policy framework lies the supposition that interregional collaboration actively facilitates the absorption and recombination of diverse and complementary knowledge domains. Nevertheless, the existing body of empirical evidence substantiating this assertion remains relatively weak. Our purpose is to bridge this gap by investigating the extent to which interregional collaboration can bolster the autonomous inventive capacity of regions. To achieve this goal, we focus on several dimensions of interregional collaboration, including intensity, diversification, depth, internal–external imbalance and quality.

KEYWORDS:

• interregional technological collaboration
• Smart Specialisation framework
• regional absorptive capacity
• regional innovation performance

JEL:

• O32
• Q55
• R11

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We extend our sincere appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for their invaluable suggestions and comments, which made a substantial contribution to improving this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This variable presents some limitations since regions could have a higher propensity to seek partnerships beyond the regional boundaries because of thinner internal resources and shorter spatial distance to neighbouring regions (which relies on a smaller size of the region). However, cognitive and institutional proximity may also foster linkages with distant regions, inside and outside Europe. Future research could consider disentangling this measure to explore different details, but is beyond the scope of this study.

2. External RTAs are defined as the technological field where a region owns an RTA relying on external knowledge. Operationally, EXT.RTA is 1 when TOT.RTA is 1, but INT.RTA is 0.

3. It is important to note that the three dependence variables represent variations of the same phenomenon. Hence, we only include the most explanatory one.