Relatedness, Cross-relatedness and Regional Innovation Specializations: An Analysis of Technology, Design, and Market Activities in Europe and the US

Carolina Castaldi and Kyriakos Drivas

Economic Geography, 2023, vol. 99, issue 3, 253-284

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.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00130095.2023.2187374 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Relatedness, Cross-relatedness and Regional Innovation Specializations: An Analysis of Technology, Design and Market Activities in Europe and the US (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:99:y:2023:i:3:p:253-284

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/recg20

DOI: 10.1080/00130095.2023.2187374

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Geography is currently edited by James Murphy

More articles in Economic Geography from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().