ABSTRACT
Introduction Recently regions have attracted increasing interest as the locus of innovation and as the geographical domain of innovation policy. The latter is remarkable as the discussion and the analysis of innovation policy has largely focused national measures (Fritsch and Stephan 2005). As a basis for suitable tailoring of policy measures and their profound discussion broad and multifaceted information has to be available about the content and the structure of the regional innovation activities (Laranja et al. 2008). In this sense learning about the regional innovation capabilities and the specialization profiles is an essential part of a strategic intelligence for innovation policy making (Kuhlmann 2005). This chapter is based on the assumption that innovation is regional. It seeks to sketch out an approach how insight can be gained into the technological specialization profiles of regions. We first discuss the conceptual background and the research question guiding the analysis. Then we introduce the data set used and the measures derived. We discuss how we construct indicators from the measures to capture the regional specialization and variety. Subsequently we present the results and conclude with a brief discussion and an outlook into further research.
