Two stylized facts about innovations form the underlying motivation for this paper. First, various studies have found that innovations tend to be geographically concentrated. Secondly, innovation data based on patent counts indicate that most patents have very low economic value. It has also successfully been shown that quality-adjusting patent data (by means of e.g. citations received from later patents) bring them a great deal closer to the innovation concept. At the same time, a large literature has developed which tries to evaluate the impact of regional innovativeness on factors such as regional growth and employment. This literature is often hampered by lack of adequate data, but patent counts are regularly employed to measure regional innovativeness. It therefore seems to be of importance to examine whether it matters if patent data is quality-adjusted. A step in this direction is provided in this paper by examining if patent data become more or less geographically concentrated after quality-adjustment. I find that quality-adjusted patents are more geographically concentrated than raw patent grants. This result is obtained analyzing all patents aggregated. When analyzing different technologies separately, this result is retained for between 55-67 per cent of technologies. One third of technologies instead become geographically more dispersed.
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Paper provided by CIRCLE (Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy), Lund University in its series CIRCLE Electronic Working Paper Series with number
2006-14.
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