Determinants of cross-border co-patents: empirical evidence from 45 European regions

Innovation processes are often interactive because the actors involved require complementary knowledge assets. Given the potentially lower institutional proximity (in terms of language, culture and formal regulations) when compared to domestic counterparts, cross-border interactive innovation processes between actors are less likely to occur. However, these processes are important for firms and (cross-border) regions to ensure economic growth and competitiveness in the long term. In addition, cross-border interactive innovation processes provide opportunities to enhance creative potentials through the combination of knowledge generated in different (national) innovation systems. By simultaneously exploring the effects of institutional proximity, technological proximity, spatial distance and European integration, this paper further enriches the literature. Negative binomial gravity models give insight into the reasons for differences in the number of generated co-patents in 45 European cross-border regions. As expected, spatial and technological distance have negative impacts on co-patent activities in all models. Sharing a common official language (i.e., institutional proximity) significantly increases the number of cross-border co-patents ceteris paribus by a factor of 1.83 to 2.49. Further (qualitative) research is, however, necessary to concretely determine the underlying language effects and to isolate these from cultural factors. Surprisingly, the results also reveal that, ceteris paribus, length of EU membership exerts a significant negative effect on co-patenting, whereas belonging to ‘Central and Eastern European Countries’ has a significant positive effect on co-patenting. Consequently, cross-border regions of the founding EU member states are relatively and ceteris paribus less involved in cross-border co-patenting activities than their Eastern European counterparts.