Technological progress and effects of (supra) regional innovation and production collaboration. An agent-based model simulation study.

We provide a novel technology development model in which economic agents search for transformations to build artifacts. Using this technology development model, we conduct an agent-based model simulation study on the effect of (supra-)regional collaboration in production and innovation on technological progress, for different industry knowledge structures. We find that supraregional collaboration in innovation boosts technology development, particularly in terms of product ad-vancedness. On top of that, we find that supraregional production collaboration enables construction of more complex artifacts. However, although we find that technology development is boosted by supraregional collaboration in transformation search as well as in artifact building, this is particularly so for specific transformation blueprints, i.e. for specific industry knowledge structures. Ultimately, we find that technology progress levels off regardless of the structure of this transformation blueprint, even if the number of technological options grows exponentially.