What makes innovation happen, and how can we tell?

Giovanna Capponi's research deals with the incentives, dynamics, and mobility of people and ideas that drive knowledge and innovation. She studies intellectual property rights and their role in shaping firms' innovation strategies, including in the context of the circular economy; she develops empirical methods to identify and track innovation, from breakthrough technologies to the niches that drive sustainability transitions; and she investigates how the mobility of knowledge workers across organizations and borders contributes to the diffusion of ideas.

She is Assistant Professor of Innovation Studies at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Faculty of Geosciences), Utrecht University. She holds a Bachelor and Master in Economics and Management of Innovation and Technology from Bocconi University, and a PhD in Economics from the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, where she defended a thesis on breakthrough innovations and appropriability strategies. During her PhD she was a visiting researcher at Imperial College Business School. She approaches innovation from an economics perspective, publishing in innovation, management and sustainability journals.