Do Environment-related technologies strengthen the competitiveness of local systems?

Environmental innovation is considered one of the key drivers of sustainable development and economic growth. However, we still know very little about the organizational factors underling the development of this category of innovations and their relative competitive effect. In this paper, we focus on regions and we look at the specific effect of environment-related technologies and collaborative environmental inventions on the competitiveness of European regions. In fact, the complex and multidisciplinary nature of environmental innovation is expected to further strengthen the competitive advantage of regions and the strategic significance of geographical proximity. A longitudinal study of 232 European regions over the period 2000-2013 was organized using data from the RegPat, Cambridge Econometrics and Eurostat databases. Our main results confirm the positive effect of environment-related technologies and local collaborative networks on regional competitiveness with significant implications in terms of policy making.