Like a dirt track, innovation can be radical, unconventional, adapted to human’s requirements, sometimes arising in a spontaneous order, and, most importantly, always evolving. This characteristic of continuous development fascinates scientists ever since and has led to a huge corpus of literature in the geography of innovation. But still, innovation always happens within the (edges of the) known, also depending on the paths that someone already took. Following Brenner and zu Jeddeloh (2023), those paths can be identified, categorized, and used to analyze systems that do not only depend on their history but also are reproduced, shaped, and created by human action. Given the complexity and diversity of today’s economic and innovation systems, further detailed analyses are still needed to improve our knowledge of path dependence in innovation processes and economic development.
This special session follows the questions of how and why innovations emerge, evolve, and (maybe) end within path-dependent systems. Since those are complex and diverse issues, we highlight the necessity to do research with the same amount of diversity. Therefore, we encourage scientists from all fields and methodological backgrounds to contribute on, but not limited to:
Accepted papers for this session are planned to be part of a special issue of the Review of Regional Research, a SCOPUS and Web of Science indexed journal.
Reference
Brenner, T., zu Jeddeloh, S. Path dependence in an evolving system: a modeling perspective. Cliometrica (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-023-00266-z
