Session organisers:

• Rudiger Ahrend (Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, OECD, France)
• Andrea Ascani (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy)
• Alessandra Faggian (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy)
• Alexander C. Lembcke (Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, OECD, France)
• Alexandra Tsvetkova (OECD Trento Centre for Local Development, Italy)
• Wessel Vermeulen (OECD Trento Centre for Local Development, Italy)

Description:

The ongoing pandemic has drawn acute attention of academics, but perhaps more so of policy makers, to the issue of resilience. While markets are designed and function to maximise efficiency, the current emergency shows that in some circumstances efficiency might come at the cost of lower resilience. Innovation plays an important role in boosting both productivity and resilience but can also have a “dark side” of undermining resilience through direct and indirect channels.
A thorough spatial examination of the productivity-resilience link and the role of innovation in both synergies and trade-offs between the two is needed to factor in resilience in the academic and policy discourse about productivity and innovation.
The proposed session aims to attract policy-oriented research that can inform regional policies in OECD countries and beyond. We invite high-quality quantitative and qualitative submissions that address the following (and related) questions:

• What can innovation (policy) do to enhance both productivity and resilience? What are the synergies and what are the trade-offs?
• What is the link between productivity and resilience in various regional, sectoral and governance contexts? What role does innovation play?
• What are the mechanisms that link regional productivity and resilience through innovation (e.g. local networks, concentration of activity & exposure, specialisation of regions within value chains, etc.)?
• Is there a “dark side” of innovation when it comes to productivity and resilience

We aim to bring together scholars interested in the above topics, whether engaged in theoretical, empirical or methodological research. Both full papers and extended abstracts (around 2-3 pages) can be submitted.