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Wednesday, May 3, at 12pm, DEMS Seminar Room 2104, Buiding U7-2nd floor
From seed to tree: how do regional specializations in environmental innovation emerge and persist?
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The DEMS Management Seminar series is proud to host
Carolina Castaldi,
Utrecht University
Abstract: European regions are increasingly motivated to invest in environmental innovation, with the European Union placing greening of economies on top of many agenda’s. An extensive literature has investigated the emergence of regional specializations in environmental technologies, but we know much less on the demand side of regional greening processes. These involve the translation of technological opportunities into actual new products and services that economic actors can adopt and use to embrace environmental sustainability goals. In this study we shed light on the demand side of environmental innovation at the regional level in two ways. First, we study regional specializations in environmental innovation, rather than invention and technologies. We do so by developing novel trademark-based metrics that capture the introduction of green products and services. Second, we incorporate green public procurement as a key demand-pull measure to promote environmental innovation. We analyze the extent to which this policy measure plays a role, next to market or technology-driven capability development of regional firms. Our empirical analysis focuses on European regions in the period 2000-2020 and reveals that only a few regions have been able to develop market specializations in environmental innovation. We find that both prior related capabilities and green public procurement are positively associated with the emergence and persistence over time of regional specializations in environmental innovation. The role of green public procurement appears less strong than prior capability development for the emergence of specializations, while the two forces are comparable when it comes to persistence.
Bio speaker: Prof. dr. Carolina Castaldi holds the Chair in Geography of Innovation. Her research deals with processes of innovation and how they unfold over time and over space. She uses theories and tools from evolutionary economics to account for the dynamic and complex nature of the innovation processes. Her goal is to develop a broad account of innovation, as including both technological forms and non-technological ones as well. As such, she has investigated extensively how innovation emerges in service sectors and the changing business models through which companies compete in local and global markets. Her contribution to the economic geography field has been to draw attention to diversity in knowledge as a source of regional innovation and she continues to investigate how innovation drives regional development and the resilience of places. Her original contribution to the emerging field of geography of innovation also includes the development of novel indicators of innovation, exploiting patent and trademark data. Carolina Castaldi is Editor at Industrial and Corporate Change and member of the Board of EPIP (European Policy for Intellectual Property).
The seminar will in presence, DEMS Seminar Room 2104, Building U7-2nd floor
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