Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography Institute News
Our department at the GeoInno22 in Milano

Our department at the GeoInno22 in Milano

GeoInno is the world's largest conference dedicated to the spatial implications of innovation. The sixth of this biennial conference gathered the community in Milan in early July 2022, with four keynotes, two policy sessions and 67 parallel sessions with almost 250 presentations. Of course, GeoInno is always a very important conference for the economic geography of our institute as well, because innovations have been one of the focal points of our research for many years. At GeoInno22, seven scientists from our institute were involved in eight presentations.

Louis Knüpling presented current research on the mechanisms of technological change in regions. Lennard Stolz and Martin Queißner (Bochum) gave a presentation entitled "Synthesising the Evidence on Entrepreneurial Contexts: A Meta-Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems". Rolf Sternberg and Louis Knüpling jointly presented their ideas on the relationship between digital infrastructure, location preferences of the highly skilled and disparities between rural and urban regions in Germany, based on the ongoing research project ReDiCOV. Sebastian Losacker presented his current research results on the spatial diffusion of environmental innovations in Chinese regions, generated together with Jens Horbach (Augsburg) and Ingo Liefner. Hendrik Hansmeier (Karlsruhe, external PhD student in economic geography at LUH) also spoke on a similar topic, presenting his preliminary evaluations on the geographical distribution of environmentally friendly technologies and green start-ups in the transport sector in Germany. Louis Knüpling, together with Lars Mewes (Wolfsburg), is involved in work on the spatial concentration of innovation activities and the causes of their variance between countries, presented in Milan by Tom Brökel (Stavanger). Julian Barnikol presented his findings on frugal innovations in different regions, jointly developed with Ingo Liefner. Finally, Rolf Sternberg was one of the five discussants at the policy session organised by the OECD on "Automation, Digitalisation and AI: A roadmap for regions".