Regional Innovation Systems of Medical Technology

Abstract

We investigated the role of external funding in cardiovascular device innovation across 31 countries in Europe. We rely on the knowledge production function (KPF) framework that establishes the knowledge output of a region as a function of innovatory effort and other characteristics of that region. In a cross-sectional analysis, we investigated regional variation in knowledge production by the number of publications in cardiovascular device research obtained from the bibliometric data of the world’s largest biomedical library, the US National Library of Medicine, 2014‒2017. We mapped these publications to product categories of medical devices approved for cardiovascular diseases by the US Food and Drug Administration. Considering spatial correlation across regions of Europe in our estimates of the KPF, we investigated the impact of two types of funding mechanisms: grants reported in the publications and the volume of European Union Horizon 2020 funding received by the innovating regions. We obtained 123,487 cardiovascular device-related publications distributed across 1,051 (75% of total) regions (NUTS-3 level). Receiving external funding strongly contributes to a region’s knowledge output. The estimated elasticities of innovatory effort range between 0.51 and 0.64. These estimates were consistently larger than the elasticities of other characteristics in the region measured by gross domestic product (0.14‒0.56). We also documented spillover effects from neighboring regions when the funding was measured by the grants reported in the publications, concluding that innovatory efforts in the form of external research investments are effective for promoting innovation in the medical device industry at the regional level.