Elena Lutz receives the 2020 Nathaniel Lichfield Award
Elena has made an original and outstanding contribution to the field of regional studies with her master thesis at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Elena’s thesis investigates the puzzle of Switzerland’s extraordinary innovation success over the past decades. To investigate Switzerland’s innovation success, Elena tests different hypotheses on institutional complementarities using the Varieties of Capitalism framework. Her paper finds that Switzerland’s innovation success can only be understood by allowing for regional differences in innovation specialization, i.e. “regional varieties of capitalism”. Thus, the paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the important role of regions in explaining national innovation success. Second, the paper makes a methodological contribution to the literature by developing a new measurement for the concepts of radical versus incremental innovation.
“We congratulate Elena warmly for this achievement.”
An article by external page regionalstudies.org