Science and Technology Cooperation in Cross-border Regions::A Proximity Approach with Evidence for Northern Europe

Given the sheer number of cross-border regions (CBRs) within the EU, their socio-economic importance has been recognized both by policy-makers and academics. Recently, the novel concept of cross-border regional innovation system has been introduced to guide the assessment of integration processes in CBRs. A central focus of this concept is set on analyzing the impact of varying types of proximity (cognitive, technological, etc.) on cross-border cooperation. Previous empirical applications of the concept have, however, relied on individual case studies and varying methodologies, thus complicating and constraining comparisons between different CBRs. Here a broader view is provided by comparing 28 Northern European CBRs. The empirical analysis utilizes economic, science and technology (S&T) statistics to construct proximity indicators and measures S&T integration in the context of cross-border cooperation. The findings from descriptive statistics and exploratory count data regressions show that technological and cognitive proximity measures are significantly related to S&T cooperation activities (cross-border co-publications and co-patents). Taken together, our empirical approach underlines the feasibility of utilizing the proximity approach for comparative analyses in CBR settings

Inter-regional innovation cooperation and structural heterogeneity:Does being a rural, or border region, or both, make a difference?

This paper analyses the determinants of inter-regional innovation cooperation in European knowledge networks. Our main goal is to assess whether structural heterogeneity in the context of the “urban-rural dichotomy†and international borders can explain differences in the regions’ engagement in inter-regional innovation coopera-tion. We estimate a gravity equation to model innovation cooperation, proxied by inter-regional co-patent ap-plications, as a function of region-specific context conditions as well as technological and geographical distance. Our data comprise dyadic information on 203 NUTS2 regions in 15 European countries (EU-15) for the year 2010. The empirical results show that the basic gravity mechanisms drive the direction and strength of in-novation cooperation between EU regions; i.e., geographical distance acts as an impediment to inter-regional co-patent applications. Regarding the importance of structural heterogeneity, we find that pairs of rural regions have lower levels of innovation cooperation compared to urban regions. Similarly, border regions are generally disadvantaged compared to non-border regions in terms of the intensity of innovation cooperation. However, while the latter result points to a negative border effect, our gravity model estimates also show that pairs of border regions are more active in terms of close geographical innovation cooperation (e.g., through international cross-border cooperation), which partly compensates for the negative border effect. This finding not only holds for urban but also rural border regions and may reflect policy attempts to support border regions, e.g., by strengthening the level of international cross-border cooperation within the EU