Drivers of Collaborative Invention in Lagging Behind Regions (LBRs) : a Gravitational Analysis

Sustaining inventors’ network by fostering interregional collaborations has been one of the main pillar in the regional policy platform promoted by European Research Area in the last decades. European funding programmes evermore enforce to identify project partners outside the region or the country in order to cheer the extent of local networks and support the knowledge flows and spillovers across regions. In this light, an increasing number of studies have recently discussed the role intraregional as well as interregional collaborations play in supporting the invention performance of regions. A limited number of them focused on exploring the relationship between core and peripheral regions though. This paper contributes to fill this gap by investigating the triggers of interregional patenting collaborations through the gravity modelling of European core-peripheral regions collaboration pairs. On the one hand, the study explores the geographical proximity and technological relatedness between the regional pairs, and on the other hand, it disentangles the impact of both core and peripheral regional features on the intensity of the interregional inventive collaboration.