Building relational competences or relying on neighbours: How to enhance innovation?

The target of this paper is twofold: identifying the network relations (if any) that are used up in French manufacturing industries in order to innovate, and evaluating the impact on regional innovativeness of those networking activities in comparison to spillover effects and to internal development of competences. Concretely, we use a huge database on competences for innovation (Sessi, 1997), and run an econometric estimation of the impact of different categories of innovative competences (mostly relational ones) held by firms of a region, on the regional innovative activity. Our results confirm the benefits of networking and highlight the intra and inter- industrial relational competences regional policymakers have to support in order to increase the innovativeness of their territory.