IN-EAST School of Advanced Studies

The IN-EAST School of Advanced Studies constitutes a joint enterprise of researchers at the IN-EAST and colleagues in various faculties and research networks at the University of Duisburg-Essen. It has been founded in order to explore the issue of innovation in East Asia from a multidisciplinary perspective that allows for the generation of new knowledge and the advancement of new methodological approaches. 

The IN-EAST School of Advanced Studies’ research agenda takes the embeddedness of processes of innovation in society as a whole as its general interest. In this context the focus lies on the interdependent topics of electro-mobility and urban systems. All research activities take East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) as subject of their analysis, but provide interfaces for international comparisons and comparative research agendas.

Innovation is understood as a social phenomenon that does not only cover the act of technological innovation but must be embedded in specific ‘social technologies’ that create innovation-inducing environments and promote the diffusion of new technological solutions in the socio-economic system in order to succeed. The starting point of the research effort may therefore be seen in the trans-disciplinary innovation literature highlighting the institutional foundations of national, regional, sectoral as well as technological innovation regimes. These specific institutions can be interpreted as ‘capital goods’ determining the productivity of individual and social innovation efforts. But as these embedding institutions are existing in specific national cultures and follow different cultural, political and technological path dependencies, innovation in general must be understood as a process that is very much determined by ideosyncratic national and cultural characteristics.    

Based on this understanding we believe that a systematic collaboration between different systemic disciplines and area studies can generate significant advances in our knowledge of innovation in general and the parameters of national, regional, sectoral as well as technological competitiveness. 

The methodological focus of the IN-EAST School of Advanced Studies shall contribute to the strengthening of new promising methodological approaches from the social sciences in research agendas featuring a regional focus. While all research agendas shall be linked to the institutional(ist) approaches of their respective disciplines, in the field of economics the focus shall rest on experimental economics in particular and behavioral economic approaches in general. The methodological corner stone of research based in the political sciences shall be the process tracing approach while in sociology the emergence school shall lay in the focus of the research agendas.  

The organization of research will be based on the research group concept already well established in the natural sciences but still new to social sciences. The IN-EAST School of Advanced Studies will at its core feature six research groups, which will be constituted by one Junior Professor / Post Doc and two PhD students each. Each of these research groups will work on one specific aspect of the overall research agenda. Communication and exchange of ideas, results and insights between the groups will be facilitated by a series of workshops and joint events and a team of mentors coming from the University of Duisburg-Essen as well as leading international institutions. These mentors will not only become the formal PhD supervisors in the respective faculties and provide advice and support for specific research activities but also provide intellectual bridges between the research groups and work on meta-topics devised to establish a coherent picture of the joint research effort.