Innovation processes are often interactive because the actors involved require complementary knowledge assets. Given the potentially lower institutional proximity (in terms of language, culture and formal regulations) when compared to domestic counterparts, cross-border interactive innovation processes between actors are less likely to occur. However, these processes are important for firms and (cross-border) regions to ensure economic growth and competitiveness in the long term. In addition, cross-border interactive innovation processes provide opportunities to enhance creative potentials through the combination of knowledge generated in different (national) innovation systems.By simultaneously exploring the effects of institutional proximity, technological proximity, spatial distance and European integration, this paper further enriches the literature. Negative binomial gravity models give insight into the reasons for differences in the number of generated co-patents in 45 European cross-border regions. As expected, spatial and technological distance have negative impacts on co-patent activities in all models. Sharing a common official language (i.e., institutional proximity) significantly increases the number of cross-border co-patents ceteris paribus by a factor of 1.83 to 2.49. Further (qualitative) research is, however, necessary to concretely determine the underlying language effects and to isolate these from cultural factors.Surprisingly, the results also reveal that, ceteris paribus, length of EU membership exerts a significant negative effect on co-patenting, whereas belonging to ‘Central and Eastern European Countries’ has a significant positive effect on co-patenting. Consequently, cross-border regions of the founding EU member states are relatively and ceteris paribus less involved in cross-border co-patenting activities than their Eastern European counterparts.

No abstract

State‐of‐the‐art research has identified mental distance, which is the limited perception of occurrences beyond one’s country’s border, as the main determinant of moderate cross‐border interactions in Europe. While it is well understood that mental distance is an upstream process that occurs prior to (bounded) rational decision‐making, it is not clear whether and, if so, which determinants affect the degree of mental distance. Standardised interviews with inhabitants of the Euregio Meuse–Rhine cross‐border region were conducted in 2019 to detect the potential effects of language (areas), sociodemographic characteristics and centre–periphery relations. The results demonstrate that knowledge of regionally spoken languages (German, French and Dutch) leads to a lower mental distance in four out of five cases, whereas English abilities surprisingly have the opposite effect. In addition, the outcomes indicate that centre–periphery relations can outweigh the fact that two cross‐border sub‐regions share the same official language.