ИСТИНА

Regions do not develop in isolation. It is assumed that there is some influence of neighboring regions on each other, and the strength of such interaction depends on technological, economic and geographical distance. The diffusion and location of innovative activities, new technologies and knowledge have their own specifics. More innovative regions are able not to drag development on themselves, but on the contrary, to spread innovative influence through institutions and information and communication technologies to neighboring regions and further, increasing the level of their involvement in innovative development. At the same time, companies, patenting their inventions, still make a choice between regions, which means that competition factors remain. The spread of innovative agglomerations and the polarization of regions are influenced by innovative ecosystems, clusters, megaregions, large firms, research centers and universities. We assessed the relationship between the territorial concentration of innovation and spatial dependence and determined how technological innovation activities in one region are related to those in neighboring regions. We calculated global and local Moran I indices for 169 European Union regions by the number of European patent applications for 2018, 2019, and 2020. There is divergence between EU regions in terms of the number of patents (with E(I) = -0.005952 and I = 0.7704, 0.6564, 0.2544, respectively). We constructed scatter maps for three years and analyzed the changes in dynamics. We have identified 4 groups of regions. (1) HL (high-low) – territories that have a high number of patents and are adjacent to regions with low values of the indicator. (2) LL (low-low) – territories not affected, they have a low number of patent applications and are surrounded by neighbors with similar indicators. (3) LH (low-high) – regions with a low number of patent applications, surrounded by regions with high values. (4) HH (high-high) – regions with high indicators surrounded by similar regions. Most regions in the EU register a relatively small number of patents and are weakly dependent on the influence of neighbors. Among them, we identify those regions that may in the future become core (HL) or create an innovative development cluster (HH). Such regions are clearly visible in Finland, Ireland, Spain and Poland. It is necessary to pay attention to the leading regions, which do not contribute to the development of neighboring territories (HL). They are in France, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Spain. Innovative development clusters are becoming more differentiated, and their number is decreasing.