Luisa Gagliardi

Bocconi University

Luisa Gagliardi is an Assistant Professor at Bocconi University in the Department of Management and Technology, a Research Affiliate at ICRIOS Bocconi, and a Visiting Staff member at the LSE’s Department of Geography and Environment. Before joining Bocconi, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores the dynamic relationship between location characteristics and individual decision-making processes. Specifically, she examines how individual decisions relate to the geography of production, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and how these connections impact individuals, organizations, and society. Another strand of her research focuses on diversity within organizations and across different spatial contexts. Her work has been featured in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Economic Geography, and Research Policy, among others. She serves on the Editorial Review Board of Organization Science and as a Representative-at-Large for the Knowledge & Innovation Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society (SMS).

The Micro-Geography of Entrepreneurship in Unequal and Evolving Cities

Entrepreneurial activity is profoundly shaped by the micro-geographies in which it unfolds. Recent research shows that neighborhoods are not merely backdrops for entrepreneurial action—they actively structure opportunities, inequalities, and the long-term sustainability of entrepreneurial ecosystems. This keynote integrates insights from strategy, economic geography, and urban studies to illustrate how entrepreneurial clusters arise unevenly across micro-locations, generating dense concentrations of talent, amenities, and investment, while also producing new forms of exclusion, displacement, and spatial inequality. Throughout the keynote, I will examine how neighborhood-level social and economic dynamics shape the processes through which entrepreneurial activity emerges, develops, and interacts with its local environment—and how actors embedded in these contexts make decisions by interpreting and responding to micro-geographic signals. These signals influence how they adjust their strategies, reallocate attention and resources, and modify the timing, scale, or location of their actions. Together, these decision-making processes play a critical role in steering the evolution, resilience, and spatial organization of urban entrepreneurial ecosystems, ultimately determining which places thrive, which lag behind, and how cities evolve as centers of innovation.