On February 20, seven members of the Institute for Economic and Cultural Geography (IWKG) attended the doctoral colloquium "Innovation, Industrial Dynamics, Entrepreneurship, Organization and Space" (IIDEOS) in Marburg. In addition to several presentations by colleagues from the universities of Kassel, Cologne and Marburg, there were also two presentations from the ranks of the IWKG.
Dmitry Boyko reported on the survey of the use of smartphone applications for public transport in Hannover and Hamburg, which is planned to be held in 2023 as a part of the research project “Digital Access to Mobility”. The quantitative study focuses on the social groups that may experience lower levels of accessibility to transport services due to the emerging dominance of digital media. The colloquium’s participants provided valuable feedback on the methodological and organizational aspects of the research.
Lukas Häfner gave a presentation entitled "Firms' access to external knowledge for digitalization: Constructing a typology of knowledge sources in diverse rural and urban regions". He presented data from interviews he conducted in 2022 with managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the topic of digitalization. From these interviews, he develops a typology of companies that represents how differently SMEs search for external knowledge relevant to digitization and which sources and regions of origin of knowledge they draw on in particular.
