Technological novelty and key enabling technologies: Evidence from European regions

Sandro Montresor (sandro.montresor@unitn.it), Gianluca Orsatti and Francesco Quatraro

No 2020-05, Discussion Paper series in Regional Science & Economic Geography from Gran Sasso Science Institute, Social Sciences

Abstract: This paper investigates whether the local endowment of Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) drives the regions’ capacity to create technological novelty. Looking at regional innovations as re-combinations of preexisting knowledge, we propose two indicators of regional technological novelty (absolute and local), based on patents that originally draw on still unexplored prior-art knowledge connections. We argue that KETs have inherent re-combinatorial properties of the regional knowledge base and that their local endowment drives technological novelty. We test for this argument by focusing on a sample of 1,255 NUTS3 EU regions over the period 2000-2014 in an original instrumental variable setting. With some nuances, results confirm our main hypotheses. KETs do drive significantly the introduction of local technological novelty, but this mainly occurs for an absolute kind of novelty. The development, use or eventually external acquisition of KETs is thus an important policy priority for regions willing to compete at the technological frontier.

Keywords: technological novelty; knowledge combination; key enabling technologies (KETs) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O33 R11 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2020-09, Revised 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-geo and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Technological novelty and key enabling technologies: evidence from European regions (2023)
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