Abstract
Here we attempt to advance the understanding of the impact of co-locative factors on regional innovation performance. The objectives are to answer what role co-location plays in explaining differences in regional innovation performance and what methodological improvements can compensate for the shortcomings of existing econometric analyses. The study is based on register data from the Business Register of Statistics Norway and patent data from the Norwegian Patent Office for the period 1995-2003, aggregated to 161 labour market regions of Norway. A Bayesian spatial autoregressive (heteroscedastic) estimation procedure is applied. The results confirm the role of various co-locative factors in the spatial distribution of innovation.