In this paper, we develop an analysis of the spatial distribution of knowledge production related to Key Emerging Technologies (KETs) and Societal Grand Challenges (SGCs) in Europe building on an extensive dataset developed in the H2020 KNOWMAK project. We first provide a broad characterization of European regions in terms of their knowledge volume and knowledge intensity, which leads to a distinction between the large metropolitan regions and smaller knowledge intensive regions. Second, by using principal component analysis, we identify two components of knowledge production that we broadly characterize as academic production and technology production. This distinction allows further categorizing regions in terms of the balance between the two components, which we suggest is also related to the ecology of actors in a region and, notably, of the importance of public-sector research and of knowledge producing firms. In a further step, we will adopt more advanced statistical techniques, i.e. latent class analysis, in order to provide a robust identification of classes of regions.