It was a return to his former place of work: On May 4, Louis Knüpling, a graduate of the Bachelor’s program in “Geography” and the Master’s program in “Economic Geography” who has been working as a “Junior Assistant Professor” at Utrecht University (Netherlands) for some time, successfully defended his dissertation on the topic “Advancing Knowledge Space-based Indicators of Regional Technological Change.” Based on four papers - primarily empirical and methodologically oriented, and either submitted to or already published in highly renowned journals - the cumulative, English-language dissertation addresses the central question of how the indicators used for knowledge space analyses in the context of regional technological change and regional diversification should be designed so that the theoretical concepts - which by their nature can only be captured latently - can be validated more convincingly through empirical means.
The chair of the examination committee was Prof. Peter Dirksmeier (Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography at LUH). Other examiners were Prof. Rolf Sternberg (primary reviewer and supervisor) and Prof. Ingo Liefner (both also from the Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography at LUH), as well as Prof. Tom Brökel (secondary reviewer; University of Stavanger Business School, Norway).
The dissertation will soon be available in the institutional repository of Leibniz University Hannover.
Our institute congratulates Louis Knüpling on this outstanding achievement and wishes him all the best in his future career.
