Co-evolution patterns of university patenting and technological specialization in European regions

This paper provides novel evidence on co-evolution patterns of the technological speciali- zation of innovation activities of firms and academic institutions located in the same Euro- pean region during the years from 2003 to 2014. We exploit a novel and unique dataset merging data on EU-funded R&D projects, universities, patents, and economic region- level data for a large sample of universities and firms co-located in geographical areas at the third level of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS3), which cor- respond to a sub-regional scale of analysis. Our results indicate the presence of substantial heterogeneity across the analyzed EU regions with respect to the co-evolution of industry and academia specializations. In particular, we find that the specialization into a new tech- nological domain is led by the local academic research system only in a few cases. We also document that a number of factors, at both the university and region levels, are associ- ated with convergent or divergent processes in the relative specialization of the innovation activities carried out by firms and universities co-located in the same region.