2023/04/17 by Carolina Castaldi, Kyriakos Drivas · 49 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Business #Commercialization #Complementary assets #Computer science #Conceptualization #Economic Growth and Productivity #Economic geography #Economics #Geography #Innovation process #Intellectual property #Marketing #Metropolitan area #Operationalization #Process (computing) #Regional Development and Policy #Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis #Regional science #Sociology
paper · open access · doi:10.1080/00130095.2023.2187374
published in Economic Geography 99(3), 253-284 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2023/04/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
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.