From co-presence to integration: measuring twin innovation in European agriculture, forestry and fisheries

Research on Europe’s twin transition has moved to the territorial scale, mapping where green and digital innovation co-occur and asking which regions are becoming twin innovators. Co-presence, however, is not integration, and how much integration European territories actually produce remains unknown. We address this for agriculture, forestry and fisheries, using 79,378 patent publications in 36,185 families matched to 1,767 patenting entities through Orbis. Validating the standard co-classification rule, we find two systematic sources of false positives: 44.7 per cent of the families it identifies as integrated carry as their only climate tag a subclass covering energy efficiency in digital technologies themselves, and a further set is attached to primary-sector entities through assignee matching failures. Validation reduces the category from 47 families to three, all linked to the sector through inventor-applicants and none under a stricter attribution rule; of 89 NUTS-2 regions, 14 register as twin-active on a co-occurrence indicator while two retain a validated integrated invention. Examining co-filing, we find that green and digital inventions are co-filed with partner populations that barely intersect, the digital ones mostly through individual applicants. We propose a validation protocol for twin-transition indicators and draw out implications for territorial monitoring and cohesion policy.