Session organisers:

Carolina Castaldi (Utrecht University, NL)
Dieter Kogler (Spatial Dynamics Lab, University College Dublin)
Sandro Mendonça (ISCTE Business School and SPRU, University of Sussex)

Topic:

This session is a follow-up of the successful special session on “The Geography of Trademarks” organised at the previous Geography of Innovation conference. This event brought convergence for the first time to an emergent community forming around the development and deployment of a new generation of soft indicators to research the geography of innovation and industrial dynamics.

Thanks to that session, a special issue of Regional Studies around the topic of “Regions and Trademarks” could be organized. The call for the special issue has prompted several key contributions using trademarks to capture innovation and entrepreneurial change at the regional level.

The aim of this new session is to evaluate and synchronise current efforts towards more use of trademarks in empirical research on the geography of innovation. While we have a much better grasp of what trademarks can capture (Castaldi, 2019; Mendonça et al., 2004, Flikkema et al., 2019), the geographical side of the story is still taking shape. This agenda is likely to be of interest to scholars and policy-makers alike.

We welcome submissions from authors that are working on their papers for the Regional Studies special issue and from all other researchers. Topics include:

• Studies investigating regional specialization/diversification patterns using trademarks;
• Studies on internationalisation strategies of companies using trademarks;
• Studies combining innovation data to better capture the territorial properties of innovation;
• Studies assessing the creative and entrepreneurial differentiation of cities with trademarks;
• Studies capturing alternative polices of local renewal and traditional sector catching up with trademarks;
• Studies including trademarks in policy evaluation exercises on initiatives such as “smart growth”

References

Castaldi, C. (2019), All the great things you can do with trademark data: taking stock and looking ahead, Strategic Organization, forthcoming

Flikkema, M., Castaldi, C., de Man, A. P., & Seip, M. (2019). Trademarks’ relatedness to product and service innovation: A branding strategy approach. Research Policy, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.01.018

Mendonça, S., Pereira, T. S., & Godinho, M. M. (2004). Trademarks as an indicator of innovation and industrial change. Research Policy, 33(9), 1385-1404.