CMSS 2014 Summer Workshop - Shaun Hendy
Channel: Centre for Mathematical Social Sciences
Date: 2014-12-15

Regional Innovation Favours the Diverse -  presentation by Shaun Hendy at the 2014 Centre for Mathematical Social Sciences Summer Workshop.

Abstract:
The economic geography of innovation is dominated by the interplay of spillovers. These occur when innovators generate new knowledge that in turn facilitates innovation by others, and by agglomeration effects.
Here we analyze over 30 years of patent data from the European Patent Office to investigate patterns of regional specialisation in different technical areas. To do this we make use of International Patent Classification codes. We construct a bipartite network of over 4000 geographic regions and over 600 areas of technology. We find that those regions that exhibit capability in a larger number of technical areas tend to, on average, have less ubiquitous technologies in their patent portfolio than regions with less technical diversity. Furthermore, we find that this effect increases over time with low diversity regions holding patent portfolios whose contents become relatively more ubiquitous.
We use a number of null models to distinguish between intra-regional effects due to spillovers and agglomeration and effects due to exogenous factors, such as regional populations and the relative abundance of different technology codes.