Keynote Speakers

Christian Ketels is a global expert on economic competitiveness and strategy. He recently left Harvard Business School, where he served as a faculty member and Principal Associate at Prof. Michael Porter’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness for more than 20 years. He is Senior Advisor at the House of Governance, Stockholm School of Economics, Director and Co-Chair of the Innovation Fund Denmark and chairs the Advisory Board of the TCI Network and the Scientific Advisory Board of Orkestra, the Basque Institute for Competitiveness. Dr. Ketels has extensive experience of working with top level political, corporate, and academic leaders around the world, having advised a wide range of governments, companies. and international organizations like the World Bank, the IMF, NIB, and the European Commission. His work focuses on the foundations of long-term growth, the role of location and broader macroeconomic factors in company success, the competitiveness of locations, clusters and cluster-based policies, and on regional and innovation policies.

Deborah Strumsky is professor of Economics at the Jönköping International Business School. She previously taught at Arizona State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her primary research focus in on invention and technological change with a special interest in the creation technological novelty. Her current work investigates the role of invention in society’s ability to confront the challenges of climate adaption and mitigation, and whether human invention can be accelerated by incorporating artificial intelligence techniques to address climate crisis. She brings an interdisciplinary approach incorporates methods from economics, spatial modeling/GIS, complex systems, evolutionary biology, and cultural anthropology.

Ron Boschma is full professor in Regional Economics at Utrecht University, and Professor 2 at UiS Business School of Stavanger University. Boschma has been full professor in Innovation Studies at Lund University where he was also director of the Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE). He is member of the Executive Board of the International Regional Studies Association. Boschma has published on Evolutionary Economic Geography, the spatial evolution of industries, geography of innovation, regional resilience, regional diversification, and Smart Specialization policy. Boschma has been ranked by Thomson Reuters among the top 1% of cited researchers worldwide in all scientific fields every year since 2014.

Annalisa Caloffi is Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Florence, where she teaches economics and industrial policy and economics of innovation. She is a member of the Florence data Centre and CAPP – Research Centre for the Analysis of Public Policies, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and she is the director of a master’s degree programme in economics. Her research work focuses on the analysis and evaluation of industrial and innovation policies. On this topic, she has extensively published in journals such as Research Policy, Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Technology Transfer. Recent work deals with the use of digital platforms for the production of public goods and services and policies for a just twin transition. On these topics, she currently leads national and EU-funded research projects.