Science and productivity in European Firms: How do regional innovation modes matter?

Productivity disparities in the European regions tend to persist. In order to understand the underlying sources of this phenomenon we assess the importance of science and regional innovation modes on firms’ productivity growth on a sample of 150,712 firms across 161 NUTSII European regions, over the period 2012-2017. We find that science is a major source of firms’ productivity growth, and it has been particularly important to firms located in Southern Europe and, to less extent, in Eastern EU regions, indicating that a science-push convergence process is at work in the EU peripheral regions. Our findings also show that the fast-growing productivity firms are those who benefit more from external knowledge and innovation. Growth by imitation seems to be a viable strategy restricted to the slow-growing productivity firms. These results help to conciliate contentious evidence regarding firms’ benefits from spillovers, namely from scientific knowledge.