Dr Dieter F. Kogler, School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy & Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Dublin, Ireland
RSA Early Career Research Grant Project: International Knowledge Flows and Spillovers and the Evolution of National Technology Trajectories (2013-2014)
Dieter’s RSA-funded research delivered, for the first time, a structured and replicable empirical test confirming that regional technological diversification and abandonment, i.e., future change and development, is shaped by a region’s technological structure at the present. The project was groundbreaking as, at the time, there hadn’t been a systematic investigation of regional technology evolution in Europe that provided insight into the knowledge-industry nexus.
The results replaced anecdotal evidence regarding the genesis and trajectory of industry sectors with empirical measures about their original knowledge base and offer the opportunity to develop regional innovation policies that target incremental and breakthrough invention processes by means of the recombination of existing regional knowledge capabilities. The study’s results provide insights highly relevant to the public sector, particularly in the context of innovation policies.
The research resulted in a number of conference presentations and seminars in the USA, Ireland, Russia and Canada, a book chapter on Intellectual property and patents: knowledge creation and diffusion and journal article on The evolution of specialization in the EU15 knowledge space.
Following this Early Career research project, Dieter applied for a European Research Council (ERC) Starter Grant using the RSA-funded research as a successful pilot study. This was a 5-year, €1.5m research project with the objective of producing a series of economic indicators, models and tools that enable firms and policymakers across Europe to make more informed, better-informed location-based investment decisions to boost innovation and drive regional prosperity.
Dr Dieter F. Kogler said,
The RSA EC Research Grant was a real game changer for my professional career, it provided the springboard to advance and excel my research ideas and associated outputs while at the same time created ample opportunities to connect with the wider research community as well as policy-makers and practitioners. It also gave that certain confidence boost that early-career scientists frequently need to fully pursue their research ambitions, and thus, this RSA EC Research Grant exerts impact well beyond the particular project horizon it was awarded for.
Since receiving the ERC grant, Dieter is now the co-founder and academic director of the UCD Spatial Dynamics Lab. More details on Dieter’s research projects and research outputs at https://people.ucd.ie/dieter.kogler.