Access to universities' public knowledge: Who's more regionalist?

Abstract

Patent citations are widely used indicators of knowledge flows. One originality of this paper is to track not patent-to-patent or paper-to-patent citations as usual but university-to-firms’ patent citations. Another one is not to explain citations as a function of distance between cited and cited regions but to explain regional and non-regional citations as a function of the characteristics of knowledge supply and demand in the region –a complementary approach to the geography of knowledge flows. Using a dataset of European Union regions in years 1997-2007, we find that fostering university R&D capacity enlarges the attractiveness of the local university knowledge base for firms in the region. However, it has a trade-off, since firms will take less resource to university knowledge produced elsewhere. It is possible to compensate this through increases in local business absorptive capacity, which will enable firms to access university knowledgeoutside the region.