Technological novelty and key enabling technologies: evidence from European regions

This paper investigates whether the local endowment of Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) drives the regions’ capacity to create technological novelty. Looking at regional innovations as re-combinations of preexisting knowledge, we propose two indicators of regional technological novelty (absolute and local), based on patents that originally draw on still unexplored prior-art knowledge connections. We argue that KETs have inherent re-combinatorial properties of the regional knowledge base and that their local endowment drives technological novelty. We test for this argument by focusing on a sample of 1,255 NUTS3 EU regions over the period 2000-2014 in an original instrumental variable setting. With some nuances, results confirm our main hypotheses. KETs do drive significantly the introduction of local technological novelty, but this mainly occurs for an absolute kind of novelty. The development, use or eventually external acquisition of KETs is thus an important policy priority for regions willing to compete at the technological frontier.