From June 24-27, 2021, the 60th Congress of the European Regional Sciences Association (ERSA) took place as an online event. This year’s conference on “Territorial Futures – Visions and scenarios for a resilient Europe” was jointly organized by the ERSA and Eurac Research, Bolzano. The working group was represented with two presentations at the conference.

Katharina Friz presented her work on “A question of regulation or motivation? Green innovation activities in transition economies”, in which the environmental innovation behavior of companies in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is compared to their innovation activities without an environmental focus. This paper is part of her cumulative dissertation project.

Jarina Kühn und Mariia Shkolnykova discussed their paper “Explore or Exploit? Innovation behavior of SMEs and large firms during COVID-19 crisis”, which they are co-authoring with Jessica Birkholz and Jutta Günther. The focus of the paper is to identify differences in innovation behavior between large firms and SMEs during the pandemic.