Carolina Castaldi (Utrecht University): From the technology to the innovation space

Abstract | Research inspired by the ‘principle of relatedness’ is recently moving towards a multidimensional take, whereby relatedness is not only studied in one ‘space’ at a time, but rather across multiple spaces of knowledge and economic activities.In this talk I will discuss my own research efforts towards defining relatedness in the innovation space, which I consider as spanning not only technology but also market activities. The notion of an innovation space allows to take into account more phases and types of innovation that firms or regions can specialize in. At the same time, it acknowledges complementarities between different innovation activities, through the idea of ‘cross-relatedness’.I will cover the framework proposed in the paper Castaldi and Drivas (2023) in Economic Geography and ongoing work where I apply similar ideas to understand the emergence of green innovation specializations across European regions.

Bio | Prof. Carolina Castaldi holds the Chair in Geography of Innovation at Utrecht University. Her research deals with processes of innovation and how they unfold over time and over space. Her goal is to develop a broad account of innovation, as including both technological and non-technological forms. As such, she has investigated extensively how innovation emerges in service and creative sectors and the changing business models through which companies operate in local and global markets. Her most recent research aims at understanding how firm-level innovation drives regional development and the resilience of places. Her original contribution to research on geography of innovation also includes the development of novel indicators of innovation, exploiting patent and trademark data.

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