Scale and Geographical Scope of Environmental Technology Collaboration: A Patent-Based Comparative Analysis

Collaboration is quintessential in environmental innovation because of its complexity and the contribution of multiple stakeholders. Although several papers discuss the role of collaboration in environmental innovation, few of them develop a more grounded view based on patent data. We specifically explore to what extent it significantly involves a larger number of partners and relies upon a larger share of deterritorialized collaborations. In so doing, we organise a panel dataset involving 286 European regions over eight 5-year periods from 1979 to 2018 and define a set of patent-based collaboration measures in order to compare environmental and non-environmental patent portfolios at the regional level. Our findings confirm that the collaboration for environmental innovation involves larger networks and is less dependent on spatial prox-imity. However, we find that the flow of knowledge between partners in environmental innovation is not frictionless, but collaboration is bounded within national borders.