Seminar of the Department for Innovation and Development - 13.10, 4:00 PM

We invite you to the seminar of the Department for Innovation and Development, to be held on Tuesday, 13 October at 4:00 PM in the Lange Room (A409, 4th floor).

Prof. Krzysztof Szczygielski will present the new paper "Unravelling the Geopolitics of Innovation Networks: Insights from an Agent-Based Model and Bibliometric Data", co-authored with Prof. Lorenzo Zirulia (University of Milan)

 

Abstract:

The ever growing internationalization of innovation processes seems to be facing its limits with the rise of technological rivalry between U.S. and China, the calls for a 'strategic autonomy' in Europe, and other geopolitical risks and tensions. This paper develops an agent-based network model to investigate how geopolitical risk affects knowledge diffusion when international collaboration becomes unreliable. Simulations show that there is no universally optimal innovation strategy. Instead, countries' performance depends on the interaction between domestic network architecture, international openness, geopolitical risk, technological asymmetry, and policy objectives. While openness generally maximizes absolute technological performance, incentives to decouple become stronger when countries seek to preserve their technological advantage. Geopolitical fragmentation may also create unintended opportunities for third countries by redirecting international knowledge flows. The theoretical analysis is complemented by an empirical assessment based on the European Commission JRC’s Weak Signals in Science and Technologies database. Combining publications, patents, and collaborative EU projects across twelve emerging technologies, we reconstruct the knowledge networks of the United States, China, and the European Union and assess their vulnerability to geopolitical fragmentation.