Recently, new regional innovation policy paradigms emerged that transcend
a long-lived dispute on whether either regional specialization, diversification,
or rather related variety is most conducive to regional innovativeness. This includes
‘smart specialization’ in which regions are deliberately specialized and connected following
technological relatedness, ‘gatekeepers’ in which there are pipelines between
dense regional networks, and a ‘regional mix’ of knowledge that allows sustained
‘branching’. We develop and use an agent-based model to study the conjecture that,
to stimulate (supra)regional innovativeness, social planners need to consider both, in
conjunction, the mix of technological knowledge in regions and the (inter)regional
innovation network topology. We use this agent-based model to evaluate the performance
of and study the internal mechanisms of these new policy paradigms in a variety
of scenarios. To increase the external validity of our findings, we calibrate the knowledge
graph searched by the agents in our model to the OECD patent database. We

• The Role of Network Topology and the Spatial Distribution and Structure of Knowledge in Regional Innovation Policy: A Calibrated Agent-Based Model Study