Paper to be presented at the DRUID 2012 on June 19 to June 21 at CBS, Copenhagen, Denmark, Does the global fragmentation of R&D activities pay back? The home region perspective Lorena M. D'Agostino University of Catania ldagosti@unict.it Grazia D Santangelo University of Catania graziasantangelo@gmail.com Abstract R&D activities are increasingly fragmented across borders and offshored in emerging economies. This trend questions the innovation performance of advanced country regions. However, the effects of the global R&D fragmentation on the knowledge production of the investing home regions are still unexplored. We aim to fill this gap and investigate under what conditions synergic effects between different value-added R&D activities globally offshored on the knowledge production of the OECD investing home region rise. To this end, we estimate a regional knowledge production function and apply a direct complementarity test. Our results suggest that synergies materialize when each R&D activity is offshored optimally rather than randomly. Jelcodes:O32,R11