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Place-based branding strategies are important marketing tools for both regions and firms and take advantage of consumers' embrace of the local in response to globalisation. Craft-brewing is a particularly salient user of these strategies and provides ample data. We use a dataset of breweries, their marketing language and their consumer ratings to study the effectiveness of place-based branding. We use named entity recognition to count references to geography, and measure how these references impact ratings. We find a strong, positive link between the number of place-based labels and a brewery's rating, suggesting consumers are receptive to placed-based branding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research & Innovation (R&I) policy initiatives employed by the European Union (EU) across its regional economies are important instruments to ensure the scientific and technological progress along with the associated benefits. One relevant aspect in this regard is to encourage and enable collaboration between regional partners to enhance potential learning opportunities and to ensure cohesive long-term development patterns. Furthermore, frequently these initiatives are also targeted at specific technology sectors, such as the EU R&I policy actions towards nanotechnology. Based on an advance theoretical framework and data from the official EU project databases as well as regionalized European Patent Office data, the present study develops a methodological tool through which it is possible to identify effective collaboration settings, while providing policymakers and evaluators with a practical tool that will enable them to predict the possible outcomes of such critical EU-funded R&I projects from the onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the role of brokers in the regional innovation network and its influence on innovative and collaborative outcomes. For this purpose, we make use of data from the European Patent Office and Eurostat in the period 1986–2015. We first build the regional collaboration network based on co-inventorship ties, and then we identify the brokerage roles played by each region, using the original taxonomy proposed by Gould and Fernandez (1989), to disentangle their impact on innovation and collaboration. Finally, we investigate regional collaboration intensity and how it interacts with brokerage roles, highlighting its mediating effect. Our findings indicate that brokerage roles contribute to the extension of collaboration networks, but also that they are not efficient for the creation of innovation. Collaboration intensity, on the other hand, enhances both innovation and collaborative outcomes and shows how a region can benefit from being a broker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversification of regions into new technologies is driven by the degree of relatedness to existing capabilities already present in the region. In cases where opportunities for diversification are rather limited, external knowledge that spills over from neighboring regions or from farther away might become an important driver of regional diversification. Despite the relative importance of interregional knowledge flows via collaborative work, we still have a very limited understanding of how collaboration networks across regions might facilitate diversification processes. The present study investigates the diversification patterns of European metropolitan and nonmetropolitan regions into new knowledge domains via technology classes reported in patent applications to the European Patent Office. The findings indicate that externally oriented inventor collaboration networks increase the likelihood that a new technology specialization enters a region, but this external orientation is less important for related diversification than for unrelated diversification. Further, the results demonstrate that interregional collaboration networks help diversification into unrelated technologies if external knowledge sourcing is based on a diverse set of regions and if collaboration is intense within companies located in distinct regions. Within-firm collaborations across regions can compensate for missing related skills in metropolitan and in nonmetropolitan regions alike but are especially important in nonmetropolitan regions. These results provide new evidence about the importance of knowledge flows within multilocation firms in the technological knowledge diversification of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a sample of 268 European Union (EU) regions and multilevel modelling, we demonstrate that different technological diversification measures measured as coherence and entropy-variety have different non-linear effects on regional productivity growth. These non-linear effects work in opposite directions to each other. Our analysis shows that higher regional productivity returns can be found in regions investing both around their existing technological capabilities as well as in more distant knowledge domains. Our findings have significant implications for understanding regional productivity growth processes and the implementation of Smart Specialisation Strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge has replaced labor as the key factor for productivity growth in innovation discourse. The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship (KSTE) provides the theoretical foundation to bridge the gap between knowledge and productivity growth. The way regional knowledge actually contributes to productivity growth requires a theoretical explanation because knowledge capability is an indirect and intangible input for regional productivity growth. Previous research has shown that entrepreneurship alone is insufficient to drive productivity improvements. We examine how knowledge capabilities lead to meaningful growth outcomes of new firms in a region. This study examines the determinants of productivity growth by analyzing the factors of entrepreneurship and knowledge capabilities at the regional level, especially considering the moderating effect of entrepreneurship between knowledge and regional growth; by comparing different dimensions of local knowledge capabilities; and by aggregating the contribution of knowledge capabilities and entrepreneurship to productivity growth at the regional level. The empirical analysis is performed on Italian NUTS-3 regions by utilizing an integrated data set combining patent data from the EPO PATSTAT database, and regional data from Eurostat regional statistics. This study makes two main contributions to the KSTE literature by linking knowledge, entrepreneurship, and regional growth and by providing empirical results on different aspects of regional knowledge capability. Our findings identify which types of local knowledge capabilities are more important and how related innovative activity interacts with entrepreneurial activity, elucidating the mechanisms by which knowledge affects labor productivity through entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]