Relatedness in eco-technological development in European regions

Within the smart specialisation programme, the European Commission urges regional policy-makers to assess their regional innovation potential and consider investing in the areas of eco-technologies taking into account the regions’ specific strengths and weaknesses. In evolutionary economic geography, several studies have shown that regional innovation is a path dependent process whereby new technologies develop out of the existing regional knowledge base. In this paper, we examine to what extent this is also the case for eco-innovation; if so, the existing technological structure of a region would be an important source of information for regional policymakers with respect to designing their eco-innovation policy agenda. Our results show that in EU-regions both the probability of developing eco-innovations and the number of patents in this field depends on the patents that have been developed in related fields in the region in prior years.