Keynote speakers

Prof. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: Innovating in economic peripheries: Europe, North America and China in comparison

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, where he was previously Head of the Department of Geography and Environment.

He was President of the Regional Science Association International (2015-2017), having served previously as Vice-President in 2014. He has also been Vice-President (2012-2013) and Secretary (2001-2005) of the European Regional Science Association. He is a regular advisor to numerous international organizations, including the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, the Cities Alliance, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Latin America.

Rodríguez-Pose is an editor of Economic Geography and sits on the editorial board of 30 other scholarly journals, including many of the leading international journals in economic geography, human geography, regional science, and management. He is the former holder of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant and the only social scientist to have been awarded the Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award.

Special session on: Green transformation of clusters? How clusters (could) facilitate green industry restructuring. Introduced and chaired by Associate Prof. Elvira Uyarra.

In this special session, Dr. Uyarra discusses the role of clusters, cluster facilitation and policy in the greening of regional economies. After an introduction discussing these issues in light of current research, regional industry facilitators representing strong industry clusters in Western Norway are invited to the stage to reflect upon these issues. The organisations will be announced later.

Elvira Uyarra is Associate Professor at Alliance Manchester Business School and director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR). She is also Adjunct Professor at the Mohn Centre for Innovation and Regional Development (Western Norway University of Applied Sciences).

Her research activities centre mainly on regional science and innovation policy; spatial dimensions of knowledge and innovation; evolutionary approaches to public policy, universities and regional development, and the innovation impact of public procurement. Her work has been published in leading journals in geography, innovation studies and management.

Special session on: The 'RIS-book' in honour of Bjørn Asheim

The new book on 'New Avenues for Regional Innovation Systems - Theoretical Advances, Empirical Cases and Policy Lessons' is presented by the editors (Arne Isaksen, Roman Martin, Michaela Trippl) and some of the authors. In addition to discussing the latest advances in regional innovation research, the book is written in honour of Bjørn Asheim's 70th birthday. As part of this plenary, Prof. Asheim will reflect upon the status and future role of the RIS approach.

Prof. Arnt Fløysand: Exploring and exploiting the trinity of innovation

Arnt Fløysand is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bergen. His dominant research interest is investigations of knowledge-network-capital dynamism in different time-spatial settings by combining theories and concepts from innovation studies, economic geography, cultural geography and political ecology. He is particularly experienced in studies of development/economic restructuring at place/community level and innovation/competitiveness at cluster/firm levels.

Conceptually, his work is concerned with combining insights from agency-structure oriented accounts of social theory wdith time-spatial accounts derived from institutional economics and political ecology. In dealing with this, he has been studying processes of globalisation, and how discourses, narratives and rules of conduct are informing practices of resource extraction of multi-scaled socio-economic actors, as well as other driving forces explaining innovation, industrial restructuring and changes of development.