Correspondence: johannes.wachs@uni-corvinus.hu

Summary of theme and objectives

Much of the innovation in the economy is happening in digital inputs (software-centric goods
and services). Software and computing increasingly drive advances in fields with physical products as diverse as medicine, manufacturing and robotics, and autonomous vehicles and transportation. Service sectors like healthcare, law, banking, insurance, and logistics are even more amenable to and affected by digitization. The software sector itself is quickly changing because of advances in artificial intelligence.

The ongoing digitization of the economy is changing the skills needed to innovate and the types of jobs created in the economy. Relatedly, new ICT powered by the internet, data and software is changing how people work and interact. For example, the proliferation of remote work changes both the breadth and intensity of collaborations people have. AI may allow individuals to scale their productivity in certain tasks. It is still unclear how these changes will affect rates of innovation, and where meaningful innovations take place. Will innovation continue to concentrate in industry clusters? While digital goods and services are “intangibles” it seems that frontier digital economic activity may be highly geographically clustered.

In order to understand how these shifts will change the nature of work and innovation, we need to revisit classic concepts from economics and economic geography such as agglomeration and clustering, specialization and distribution of labor, and collaboration and coordination of work in this new context. An important topic is how to define and measure digital innovation. A mix of traditional and new metrics could be used. Fortunately, activities in the digital economy leave behind rich but novel sources of data which we may use to both understand how innovations in digital technologies and services come about, and how they may change the future of work and the economy. The challenge researchers face is to adapt to new sources of data and a new context for research. The opportunity for researchers is that these data will allow them to revisit classic ideas about the geography of innovation.

This special session aims to highlight advances in three related strands of research:

1. How can we measure and understand innovation in digital work and services?
2. What is the role of economies of agglomeration and clusters in digital innovation?
3. How is the digitization of the economy changing the nature of work, collaboration, and hence innovation?

Topics
We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics within these areas. Examples include:

• Geographic specialization in digital technologies
• Diffusion of digital technologies across sectors and geography
• Novel metrics and data sources for measuring firm and regional digital capabilities
• Service innovation and product-service system innovation
• Mobility of digital workers
• Virtual versus face-to-face collaborations for creativity and innovation

References

• Brucks, Melanie S., and Jonathan Levav. “Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation.” Nature 605.7908 (2022)
• Lin, Yiling, Carl Benedikt Frey, and Lingfei Wu. “Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.” Nature 623.7989 (2023)
• Dell’Acqua, Fabrizio, et al. “The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise.” (2025)
• Leiponen, Aija. “Managing knowledge for innovation: the case of business‐to‐business services.” Journal of product innovation management 23.3 (2006): 238-258.
• Delgado, Mercedes, and Karen G. Mills. “The supply chain economy: A new industry categorization for understanding innovation in services.” Research Policy 49.8 (2020):
• Wachs, Johannes, et al. “The geography of open source software: evidence from github.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 176 (2022)
• Goldbeck, Moritz. “Bit by bit: colocation and the death of distance in software developer networks.” Journal of Economic Geography (2025)
• Stojkoski, Viktor, et al. “Estimating digital product trade through corporate revenue data.” Nature Communications 15.1 (2024): 5262.
• Apostol, Stefan, and Eduardo Hernández-Rodríguez. “Digitalisation in European regions: unravelling the impact of relatedness and complexity on digital technology adoption and productivity growth.” Industry and Innovation (2024): 1-30.