The Importance of Accessibility to R&D on Patent Production in Swedish Municipalities (original) (raw)

Accessibility to R&D and Patent Production

Innovation, Agglomeration and Regional Competition, 2009

The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D can explain patent production. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated both on aggregated level and for different industrial sectors. The output of the knowledge production is the number patent applications in Swedish municipalities from 1994 to 1999. In order to account for the importance of proximity, the explanatory variables are expressed as accessibilities to university and company R&D. The total accessibility is then decomposed into local, intra-regional and interregional accessibility to R&D. As often is the case with R&D outputs, the regional distribution of patents is highly skewed with influential outliers. The estimations are therefore conducted with quantile regressions. The main results on aggregated level indicate that high accessibility (local) to company R&D has the greatest positive effects on patent production. The effects are statistically significant for municipalities with a patent production corresponding to the median and to quantiles above the median. Local accessibility to university R&D is only of importance for certain industrial sectors and not on aggregated level. There is also evidence that intra-regional accessibility to company R&D affects patent production positively. A conclusion is that concentrated R&D investments in companies situated in municipalities with a high patenting activity would not only gain the municipalities themselves, but also the patent production in other municipalities in the functional region.

The effects of R&D on regional invention and innovation

CIRCLE Electronic Working Papers, 2008

This paper examines the effects of regional R&D on patenting for Sweden within an accessibility framework. We use two measures of patenting: number of patents granted per capita and a composite of quality-adjusted patents which we regard as an innovation indicator, respectively. Three conclusions emerge. First, we find that the specification where innovations per capita is used as a dependent variable performs much better than with granted patents per capita for capturing relationships with regional R&D. In fact, quantile ...

Production of University Technological Knowledge in European Regions: Evidence from Patent Data

Regional Studies, 2009

This paper explores the European regional distribution of the production of new technological knowledge generated by universities, as measured by patent counts. The empirical basis for this study is a unique panel data set of 4,580 European university patents from 1998 to 2004. Our main findings were a strong regional and sectoral concentration of patents, and no average relation between university technological specialization and industrial specialization.

R&D, patenting and patent quality in Sweden 1985-2002

2007

Abstract We use a comprehensive database covering Swedish industry and service firms 1985-1998, to examine trends in the ratio between patenting and R&D and for patenting quality among 10 sectors which cover almost the entire economy. Quality indices are composed of the indicators forward and backward citations, designated states and opposition. In contrast to earlier studies we find forward citations and opposition to have the highest weight in our indices.

R&D accessibility and regional export diversity

The Annals of Regional Science, 2007

This paper examines the influence of accessibility to R&D on the regional diversity in Swedish export. A theoretical model with fixed R&D cost predicts that spatial knowledge spillovers generates external economies of scale in R&D activities and these external effects increase the innovative capacity in regions that have high accessibility to R&D. The model implies that the effects of R&D on regional export performance are reflected by the size of the export base rather than by the export volumes. The empirical analysis focus on three different indicators of export diversity; the number of exported goods, the number of exporting firms and the number of export destinations. The hypothesis that regional accessibility to R&D facilities in the private business sector, on the one hand, and university research departments on the other hand, increases the export diversity in regions is tested in cross-regional regression models. Since knowledge cannot be regarded as a spatially trapped resource the empirical analysis includes two measures of R&D accessibility; intra-regional and interregional. The empirical results indicate that the three indicators of regional export diversity are positively affected by the intra-regional accessibility to company R&D in commodity groups that have a relatively high R&D-intensity in production. Interregional accessibility to company R&D has significant positive impacts on the number of export goods and the number of export destinations also in less R&D-intensive industries. In the case of university R&D, the empirical results are weaker, in particular in the case of intra-regional accessibility. Yet, the interregional accessibility to university R&D has a significant positive impact on the number of export goods and the number of export destinations in the majority of commodity groups.

Spatial differences in the quality of university patenting: Do regions matter

2012

This paper uses patent citation data to analyze the quality of university technology across European regions. The empirical analysis draws on a panel dataset of 4580 European university-owned patents classified by 202 European regions over the period 1998-2004. The methodology involves a multilevel framework to identify the effects of factors at three hierarchical levels (individual, university, and regional) on the quality of university patenting. The results suggest that regional factors, such as the level of development, industrial potential, and regional higher education R&D expenditure, do not play any significant role in determining the quality of European university patents. We instead find that the factors affecting patent quality stem from their specific characteristics. We also find that university size does not explain the quality of patents. However, there is significant unobserved heterogeneity at the university level in all models, suggesting that differences in other university characteristics explain a substantial part of the variance in patent quality.

Patents and innovation counts as measures of regional production of new knowledge

Research Policy, 2002

The role of geographically mediated knowledge externalities in regional innovation systems has become a major issue in research policy. Although the process of innovation is a crucial aspect of economic growth, the problem of measuring innovation has not yet been completely resolved. A central problem involved in such analysis is the measurement of economically useful new knowledge. In the U. S. information on this has been limited to an innovation count data base. Determining the extent to which the innovation data can be substituted by other measures is essential for a deeper understanding of the dynamics involved. We provide an exploratory and a regression-based comparison of the innovation count data and data on patent counts at the lowest possible levels of geographical aggregation.