290071 SE Geography of Innovation and Sustainability Transformations (2025S)

This course is part of the Specialization B: Socio-Economic Transformations (Master Programme ‘Geography: Global Change and Sustainability’).

Grand societal challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation and socio-economic inequalities require urgent action. It is becoming clear that a sole economic and technology-driven approach to innovation is insufficient to meet these challenges. What is needed are holistic visions and strategies that seek a far-reaching transformation of production and consumption systems as well as socio-ecological relations. Actors from all sectors of society are needed to drive complex innovation-exnovation in areas that are highly unsustainable and shape novel solutions that help to tackle grand societal challenges. The course will focus on options for what challenge-oriented innovation systems might look like in different spatial settings and who should drive, guide and intermediate those new systems.

Building on theoretical-conceptual approaches and empirical examples from the literature of the Geography of Innovation and Sustainability Transitions, small groups of students will develop their own ideas for challenge-oriented innovation systems in different spatial contexts. Core questions to be addressed in the course include amongst others (1) the identification and framing of place-based needs and problems; (2) the factors and processes that underpin the construction of challenge-oriented innovation systems and the measurement of their performance; (3) the significance of structure-agency dynamics in regional transformative change processes; and (4) the policy approaches that are vital to accelerate regional sustainability transitions.