https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0839-8813
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ABSTRACT
In this paper, we investigate the role of brokers in the regional innovation network and its influence on innovative and collaborative outcomes. For this purpose, we make use of data from the European Patent Office and Eurostat in the period 1986–2015. We first build the regional collaboration network based on co-inventorship ties, and then we identify the brokerage roles played by each region, using the original taxonomy proposed by Gould and Fernandez (1989), to disentangle their impact on innovation and collaboration. Finally, we investigate regional collaboration intensity and how it interacts with brokerage roles, highlighting its mediating effect. Our findings indicate that brokerage roles contribute to the extension of collaboration networks, but also that they are not efficient for the creation of innovation. Collaboration intensity, on the other hand, enhances both innovation and collaborative outcomes and shows how a region can benefit from being a broker.
Acknowledgements
The authors benefited from many useful comments and suggestions from participants to Seminars in Economic Geography series (Univ. of California L.A. and University College Dublin), the Regions in Recovery 2021 Global e-Festival (Regional Studies Association), the 4th International Conference on Cluster Research (Univ. of Florence), the DRUID 2021 Conference (Copenhagen Business School) and the 6th Global Conference on Economic Geography 2022 (Trinity and University Colleges, Dublin). Two anonymous reviewers produced the most helpful analyses of our work and pointed out many useful ways to improve it. We would like to acknowledge funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 715631, ERC TechEvo) as well as from the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under the SFI Science Policy Research Programme (grant agreement No 17/SPR/5324, SciTechSpace)
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The ARDECO is a service provided by European Commission’s Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy that contains variables and indicators for EU regions.
2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan-regions/background (last visited on February 2022).
3 We acknowledge that innovation can manifest differently in advanced and emerging innovation systems. Advanced systems tend to focus on creating new knowledge, where patents can be a useful measure of innovation, while emerging systems base their innovation on utilizing existing knowledge, such as through machinery, equipment and expertise (Vujanović et al. Citation2022). Hence, patents are not a comprehensive measure of R&D efforts in an economy and are often considered an imperfect indicator. Despite this, patents are a widely used, formal, measurable output of the innovation system in literature for tracking the production of knowledge and technologies (Acs, Anselin, and Varga Citation2002; Bergé, Wanzenböck, and Scherngell Citation2017; Françoso1 and Vonortas Citation2022; Leydesdorff et al. Citation2015).
4 In Tables B.7 and B.8 of the online Appendix B, we present a robustness check in which we re-estimate our models with the dependent variables calculated with a two-period lag.
5 To address the potential influence of Central and Eastern European regions on our results, we conducted a robustness check by including a dummy variable which takes a value of 1 for these regions. We report the results of this robustness check in Tables B.3 and B.4 in the online Appendix B and found them to be consistent with our main results reported in and in section 5 of the paper.
6 The dummy CEE.Reg takes a value of one for the group of eastern European regions in our sample, i.e.: Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia.