High growth and progressive regions possess a culture that promotes innovation. Innovation depends on a region’s ability to use its own existing knowledge and knowledge generated elsewhere. This paper demonstrates the importance of the ability to absorb external knowledge in explaining...

Regional prosperity increasingly depends on a region’s capacity to have command over the production of ideas. Measuring the production of ideas with patents, the objective of this paper is to analyze how patents in different technologies changed between 1997 and 2007 and how states took...