This paper investigates the effect of related and unrelated variety on regional growth in West Germany. In particular, we analyze the role of regional absorptive capacity and new business formation for these effects. We find that West German regions benefit from both types of varieties. The...

We analyze the spatial diffusion of knowledge in laser technology in West Germany from 1960, when this technology began, until 2005. Laser technology research has been nearly exclusively conducted in regions that are home to a university with a physics or electrical engineering department, an...

Cluster policies aim at improving collaboration between co-located actors to address systemic failures. As yet, cluster policy evaluations are mainly concerned with effects on firm performance. Some recent studies move to the system level by assessing how the structure of actor-based knowledge...

The concept of Bridging Technologies (BTs) refers to technologies which are important for the regional knowledge base by connecting different fields and thereby enabling technological development. We provide analytical tools to identify BTs and study their evolution over time. We apply these...

We analyze the role of universities or, more generally higher education institutions (HEIs), in terms of their regional and international embeddedness for regional knowledge base renewal. We assume that the introduction of radical patents in the sense of novel technological combinations...