Joint R&D subsidies, related variety, and regional innovation

Subsidies for R&D are an important tool of public R&D policy, which motivates extensive scientific analyses and evaluations. The paper adds to this literature by arguing that the effects of R&D subsidies go beyond the extension of organizations monetary resources invested into R&D. It is argued that collaboration induced by subsidized joint R&D projects yield significant effects that are missed in traditional analyses. An empirical study on the level of German labor market regions substantiates this claim showing that collaborative R&D subsidies impact regions innovation growth when providing access to related variety and embedding regions into central positions in cross- regional knowledge networks.