The impact of the regional environment on the knowledge transfer outcomes of public research organisations: Preliminary results for Europe

We use survey data for 238 European universities and 24 research institutes to examine the effect of regional factors at the NUTS 1 or NUTS 2 level on three knowledge transfer outcomes of public research organisations: the number of license agreements, start-ups and R&D agreements with companies. We find that (1) a larger share of regional employment in high and medium-high technology manufacturing sectors in the same region as the public research organisation has a positive impact on the number of license agreements. (2) A larger share of employment in knowledge-intensive services has a positive impact on the number of start-ups and research agreements, but a negative impact on license agreements. (3) Competition as measured by the number of public research organisations in a region has a negative impact on all three outcomes.