Knowledge Space, Relatedness and Complexity: A Regional Analysis in Turkey

Abstract

Regional development policies based on regions’ core strengths is key for innovative and competitive growth. For sustainable growth, each region would discover their own growth paths grounded on their core knowledge base and capabilities. Although there are studies that focus on regional clustering of economic activity and technological dispersion of sectors in Turkey, little is known related to the regions’ potential to attract new technologies based on their core strenghts. There are three objectives of the paper: The first objective is to map knowledge space (relatedness between technologies) in Turkey for 2010 and 2017. The second objective of the paper is to understand relatedness (branching opportunities) and knowledge complexity in Turkey’s regions for 2010 and 2017. The third objective is to demonstrate the relationship of regional innovativeness as measured by patent applications with relatedness and knowledge complexity across Turkey’s NUTS3 regions. The study uses data from the European Patent Office (EPO) REGPAT Database (downloaded in January 2020). In order to map Turkey’s knowledge space, we use technological relatedness between patent classes. The knowledge space is a network where nodes represent technological categories and lines represent links between each pair of technology. Relatedness of the regions is operationalized by relatedness density. Knowledge complexity is operationalized by knowledge complexity index. We use regression analysis to understand the correlation of patent applications with regions’ relatedness density and knowledge complexity. As a control variable, the regression model uses diversity variable that is operationalized by the number of technological classes in which each city has relative technological advantage. The analysis demonstrates that knowledge space in Turkey became denser between 2010 and 2017 and there are variations across regions with respect to branching opportunities and knowledge complexity. Diversity and relatedness density are positively correlated with patent applications while complexity does not have a correlation with regional innovativeness.