Migration, communities on the move and international innovation networks: an empirical analysis of Spanish regions

This paper investigates the impact of migration on innovation networks between regions and foreign countries. It positsthat immigrants (emigrants) act as a transnational knowledge bridge between the host (home) regions and their origin(destination) countries, thus facilitating their co-inventorship networks. It also argues that the social capital of both thehosting and the moving communities reinforces such a bridging role, along with language commonality and migrants’human capital. Focusing on Spain, as a country that hosted an intense process of migration over the past two decades,patent data are combined with national data on residents and electors abroad and a gravity model is applied to the coinventorshipbetween Spanish provinces (NUTS-3 regions) and a number of foreign countries. Both immigrants andemigrants affect the kind of innovation networking at stake. The social capital of both the moving and the hostingcommunities actually moderates this impact positively. The effect of migration is stronger for more skilled migrants andwith respect to non-Spanish-speaking countries, pointing to a language-bridging role of migrants. Policy implicationsare drawn accordingly.