From 17-19 March 2021, within the scope of the “TechSpace” project of the Chair of Microeconomics at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography at Leibniz University Hannover and CRIE at the University of Bremen an online workshop on "Advancing Indicators of Regional Structural Change" was held. On this occasion, innovation and regional researchers came together and discussed their latest research results.

Mariia Shkolnykova, Jessica Birkholz and Jarina Kühn from the working group Economics of Innovation and Structural Change presented their research project "Explore or Exploit? Innovation behaviour of SMEs and large firms during COVID-19 crisis", which they are developing together with Jutta Günther. They presented their first descriprive results, based on the data from companies that innovated during the Corona crisis. They are primarily interested in the differences in innovation behaviour between large and small and medium-sized enterprises. The innovation data for the empirical analysis is generated by means of sentiment analysis from current news texts.