The Importance of Accessibility to R&D on Patent Production in Swedish Municipalities

The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D can explain patent production. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated both on aggregated level and for different industrial sectors. The output of the knowledge production is the number patent applications in Swedish municipalities from 1994 to 1999. In order to account for the importance of proximity, the explanatory variables are expressed as accessibilities to university and company R&D. The total accessibility is then decomposed into local, intra-regional and inter-regional accessibility to R&D. The results indicate that high accessibility (local) to company R&D has the greatest effect on patent production. Local accessibility to university R&D has also a significant positive effect but the magnitude is smaller. There is also evidence that intra-regional accessibility to company R&D affects patent production positively.