| Course information | |
|---|---|
| Period | Block 2 |
| Timeline | March |
| Number of ECTS | 5 ECTS |
| Coordinator | Dr Beatriz Calzada Olvera |
| Lecturers | Dr Beatriz Calzada Olvera and Dr Paula Nagler |
| Methodology | Lectures, workshops |
Course description
Innovation is a central driver of growth and development. It reshapes how economies produce, how industries evolve, and how work is organized. This course examines innovation as an endogenous and cumulative process: it emerges from socio-economic structures, institutions, and capabilities, yet it also fundamentally transforms those same structures. Particular attention is given to cities as sites where innovation is created, concentrated, and contested.
Building on Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, students analyse innovation dynamics and industry restructuring, including the systematic production of winners and losers through technological change. We examine how newcomers challenge established players, how digital platforms reshape market structures, and how concentration and monopoly power can emerge alongside new opportunities for upgrading and development. Digitalisation — including artificial intelligence — is treated as a contemporary technological paradigm that transforms production systems, competitive dynamics, and economic organization.
The course further explores why innovation is geographically and sectorally uneven. Knowledge spillovers, agglomeration economies, structural capabilities, and cognitive “stickiness” help explain why some cities diversify and upgrade while others experience lock-in and stagnation. Innovation is not space-neutral; it is embedded in local production systems and institutional contexts.
A central theme is that innovation trajectories are shaped by policy — and by choices about direction. Who decides which sectors grow, which technologies are supported, and which transitions are prioritized? The course therefore examines industrial and innovation policy across multiple scales — from firm and sectoral strategies to place-based and mission-oriented approaches. Particular attention is given to green transformations, the industrial policies that shape them (or fail to do so), and the coordination challenges that underpin sustainability transitions. Rather than treating transformation as a matter of willingness alone, the course analyses it as a structural process involving incentives, capabilities, infrastructure, and alignment across public and private actors.
Finally, the course addresses digitalisation and artificial intelligence in urban labour markets. Do new technologies displace jobs or create new tasks? How do platform-based business models reshape work, productivity, and inequality? Students analyse how digital transformation manifests spatially in cities and assess its distributional consequences.
Throughout the course, students develop a structural understanding of how innovation reshapes industry, space, and labour — and how green and digital transformations can be steered through coordinated, multi-scalar policy frameworks.
Learning objectives
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Explain and interpret major theories of innovation and structural transformation, including creative destruction and technological paradigms.
- Analyse industry dynamics and the spatial concentration of innovation using concepts such as agglomeration, economic complexity, and path dependence.
- Evaluate industrial and innovation policy strategies across different scales, distinguishing between forms of intervention and assessing the challenges associated with them.
- Assess the economic and distributional effects of digitalisation and platform-based business models in urban labour markets.
- Apply theoretical frameworks from the course to a concrete empirical case, developing a structured and evidence-based argument.
Course content
This course contributes to the Urban Socio-Spatial Transformations specialisation by providing the economic and structural foundations of transformation.
The course is organised around four conceptual pillars:
- Industry Dynamics and Structural Change
Innovation as driver of growth and development; creative destruction; digital platforms and industry restructuring. - Urban Agglomeration and Uneven Innovation
Knowledge spillovers, density and productivity, economic complexity, diversification, and regional divergence. - Industrial and Innovation Policy
multi-scalar intervention (firm, sectoral, urban, national, global); place-based and mission-oriented approaches; production capabilities; green industrial strategy; systemic bottlenecks and transition coordination. - Digitalisation and Urban Labour
Automation, task reallocation, platform economies, and labour market polarization.
Lectures introduce the theoretical and conceptual foundations. Workshops are designed for structured application of these frameworks to empirical cases.