• patent-based indicators
• regional competitiveness
• smart specialization

Several causes, including the impact of the economic crisis, the increasing globalization and the diffusion of General Purpose Technologies, are forcing regions to rethink their overall approach to regional economic development. For this purpose, a European strategy labelled ‘Smart Specialization’ has been presented as instrumental to create economic welfare at regional level; its main goals are the identification of areas where a region presents an existing or potential competitive advantage and the subsequent promotion of technological diversification starting from these. The aim of this thesis is to analyze how technological diversification and technological specialization affect the regional performance. On this base, after providing a review of the literature on this debate, it has been collected a dataset including patent-based indicators of diversification and specialization and socio-economic data of 268 EU regions on which econometric analyses have been performed. The results reveal a positive effect of technological diversification, mainly the one related with the regional assets, on the economy.