R&D and Knowledge Expertise of French Regions

Within the literature of regional innovation systems, a growing stream of research emphasizes the role of differentiated knowledge bases. The employees’ occupations mainly measure the existing work on knowledge bases. Even though the conceptual theory highlights the importance of interactions across types of knowledge bases underlying innovation activities, they are separately measured and treated in most empirical studies. While few studies use the interaction term between knowledge bases, it does not reflects their actual relationships. In this study, an attempt is made to analysis and observe the regional knowledge for long periods of time. The study suggests suggesting to measure different types of expertise in science and technology of the region, as the fine-grained layers of regional knowledge bases, by using patent and publication datasets in France. Finally, we imply the new measurements to understand the relationships between regional RD however, not to the level of expertise. The results also show that the level of technological expertise will increase if it is complementary to a specific science.