Workshop: Migration And Innovation: A Research Agenda, Milan 29-30 May 2023
The project team had the fantastic opportunity to take part in a new collaboration with economists that explicitly seeks to set and shape a new research agenda on the link between migration and innovation. The workshop presented findings across different subfields and topics which, together with our project research as a historical framework, will be drawn together into a publication, forthcoming with E Elgar, that will be accessible to a wide audience of undergraduate and graduate students across economics and the social sciences. We are deeply grateful to Francesco Lissoni (Bordeaux School of Economics) and Andrea Morrison (Università di Pavia) for reaching out to us and including us in this exciting collaboration!
In economics, as Lissoni and Morrison explain, the relationship between international migration and innovation is at the same time a classic field of investigation and a new one. It is a classic one for economic historians, who have for long investigated the cross-country mobility of craftsmen, engineers and entrepreneurs, both as individuals and as members of religious minorities escaping persecution, and its role in the diffusion of technical knowledge in Europe and beyond, before and after the first Industrial Revolution. It is a new one for economists and economic geographers who, confronted with the rapid increase of highly skilled migration over the past few decades, have explored its impact on a number of interrelated phenomena at the country, regional and city level, ranging from international trade to foreign direct investment and innovation in its many facets (patenting, publishing, diversification, and more generally, economic growth). The emigration of highly skilled workers also has consequences on the origin countries, whether in terms of “brain drain” phenomenon or, as more recently stressed, of “brain gain” effects brought about by return migration and international networking. The workshop an edited volume bring together the latest research on these topic and we are very excited to form part of it.
