Spillovers from Higher Education on Regional Innovation Propensity

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of accessibility to higher education on innovation propensity. The study includes two forms of higher education – university/college and vocational. A reason for this is that although the relationship between accessibility to higher education and innovation propensity has been investigated many times over the recent years, there is a lack of research on the implications that the vocational education system has. The dependent variable representing innovation is patent grant counts for every municipality in Sweden between 2002 and 2013. By following the theoretical bases of Regional Innovation Systems, human capital and accessibility, we estimate two negative binomial regressions in a knowledge production function setting. Significant and positive effects are found for all of our explanatory variables, suggesting that access to both universities and vocational education has a positive effect on regional innovation propensity, although in different degrees. As access to education may increase people’s level of economically useful knowledge and human capital, we suggest that policies should be applied to support this access.