Related Variety, Unrelated Variety and Technological Breakthroughs: An analysis of U.S. state-level patenting

Carolina Castaldi, Koen Frenken and Bart Los

No 1302, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that unrelated variety enhances technological breakthroughs, since radical innovation often stems from connecting previously unrelated technologies opening up whole new functionalities and applications. Using patent data for US states in the period 1977-1999 and associated citation data, we find evidence for both hypotheses. Our study thus sheds a new and critical light on the related-variety hypothesis in economic geography.

Keywords: recombinant innovation; regional innovation; superstar patents; technological variety; evolutionary economic geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2013-03, Revised 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-geo, nep-his, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1302.pdf Version March 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Related Variety, Unrelated Variety and Technological Breakthroughs: An analysis of US State-Level Patenting (2015)
Working Paper: Related Variety, Unrelated Variety and Technological Breakthroughs: an analysis of U.S. state-level patenting (2013)
Working Paper: Related Variety, Unrelated Variety and Technological Breakthroughs: An Analysis of U.S. State-Level Patenting (2013)
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:egu:wpaper:1302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).